Equal Pay Day on April 10 is a day to reflect on the amount of women’s free labor

The work of Bertrand Russell, philosopher, social critic, mathematician and anti-war crusader, are still relevant today. Here’s why fans should take in the Russell collection at McMaster University.

A remote spruce planted on a Southern Ocean island holds a defining record of humans, scientists argue.

Explore patriziasoliani's 270 photos on Flickr!

The question therefore arises, “How can individuals and communities protect themselves when regulatory systems do not?” A Precautionary Tale provides a creative and inspiring answer.

The city is suffering from the worst drought in over a century—and it will affect your trip.

A media-savvy Latina is about to become the youngest member of the House—and one of the first self-avowed socialists. But can she balance the urgent desires of her progressive base with the harsh realities of Washington?

The long read: Scientists have identified 2 million species of living things. No one knows how many more are out there, and tens of thousands may be vanishing before we have even had a chance to encounter them

The cleaner wrasse fish (Labroides dimidiatus), responds to its reflection and attempts to remove marks on its body during the mirror test -- a method considered the gold standard for determining self-awareness in animals. The finding suggests that fish might possess far higher cognitive powers than previously thought, and ignites a high-stakes debate over how we assess the intelligence of animals that are so unlike ourselves.

From Johannesburg to Lagos and Nairobi, commuting in Africa’s economic hubs is often an arduous task for millions of people.

National parks and public lands should continue to be owned by all Americans. Congress must protect these special places and not allow them to be exploited for private profit.

Vermicomposting is a quick, efficient way to convert kitchen scraps into a rich soil amendment using earthworms.

The NIH and the FBI are targeting ethnic Chinese scientists, including U.S. citizens, searching for a cancer cure. Here’s the first account of what happened to Xifeng Wu.

Becoming allergic to meat turns your life upside down. Known as alpha-gal allergy, the condition dictates what you can eat, wear, how you relax, and even which medicines are safe. Is research finally starting to catch up?

Eric Holt-Giménez. A Foodie’s Guide to Capitalism: Understanding the Political Economy of What We Eat. Monthly Review Press, 2017. I wrote the Foreword for this book, which Food First published online as a Backgrounder (see my post of September 26). Here’s what the publisher says: In his latest book, Eric Holt-Giménez takes on the social, […]

By Tathi Bhattachaya, Verso, February 15, 2018 Detail from Jean-François Millet, Des glaneuses, 1857. via Wikimedia Commons. Life itself appears only as a means to life. —Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 A working woman comes home from work after an eight hour day, eats dinner in 8 to 10 minutes, and once again faces a load of physical work: washing linens, cleaning up, etc. There are no limits to housework . . . [a woman is] charwoman, cook, dressmaker, launderer, nurse, caring mother, and attentive wife. And how much time it takes to go to the store and drag home dinner! —testimonies of factory women in Moscow, 1926 This [unpaid care work] is the type of work where we do not earn money but do not have free time either. Our work is not seen but we are not free as well. —woman in Patharkot, Nepal, 2013 If our kitchens are outside of capital, our struggle to destroy them will never succeed in causing capital to fall. —Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction and Feminist Struggle Let us slightly modify the question “who teaches the teacher?” and ask this of Marxism: If workers’ labor produces all the wealth in society, who then produces the worker? Put another way: What kinds of processes enable the worker to arrive at the doors of her place of work every day so that she can produce the wealth of society? What role did breakfast play in her work-readiness? What about a good night’s sleep? We get into even murkier waters if we extend the questions to include processes lying outside this worker’s household. Does the education she received at school also not “produce” her, in that it makes her employable? What about the public transportation system that helped bring her to work, or the public parks and libraries that provide recreation so that she can be regenerated, again, to be able to come to work? The goal of social reproduction theory (SRT) is to explore and provide answers to questions such as these. In doing so, SRT displays an analytical irreverence to “visible facts” and privileges “process” instead. It is an approach that is not content to accept what seems like a visible, finished entity — in this case, our worker at the gates of her workplace — but interrogates the complex network of social processes and human relations that produces the conditions of existence for that entity. As in much of critical theory, here too we “build from Marx,” for both this approach and the critical interrogation mirror the method by which Marx studies the commodity. The fundamental insight of SRT is, simply put, that human labor is at the heart of creating or reproducing society as a whole. The notion of labor is conceived here in the original sense in which Karl Marx meant it, as “the first premise of all human history” — one that, ironically, he himself failed to develop fully. Capitalism, however, acknowledges productive labor for the market as the sole form of legitimate “work,” while the tremendous amount of familial as well as communitarian work that goes on to sustain and reproduce the worker, or more specifically her labor power, is naturalized into nonexistence. Against this, social reproduction theorists perceive the relation between labor dispensed to produce commodities and labor dispensed to produce people as part of the systemic totality of capitalism. The framework thus seeks to make visible labor and work that are analytically hidden by classical economists and politically denied by policy makers. SRT develops upon the traditional understanding of both Marxism and capitalism in two transformative ways. First, it proposes a commodious but more specific reading of the “economy.” SRT, as Susan Ferguson has recently pointed out, insists that our understanding of capitalism is incomplete if we treat it as simply an economic system involving workers and owners, and fail to examine the ways in which wider social reproduction of the system—that is the daily and generational reproductive labor that occurs in households, schools, hospitals, prisons, and so on—sustains the drive for accumulation.1 Marx clearly marks for us the pivotal role played by labor power, for it is that which in effect sets the capitalist production process in motion. He also indicates how, unlike all other commodities under capitalism, the “unique” commodity labor power is singular in the sense that it is not produced capitalistically. The implications of this insight are, however, underdeveloped in Marx. Social reproduction theorists begin with these silences in Marxism and show how the “production of goods and services and the production of life are part of one integrated process,” as Meg Luxton has put it. 2 If the formal economy is the production site for goods and services, the people who produce such things are themselves produced outside the ambit of the formal economy, in a “kin-based” site called the family. Second, and following from above, SRT treats questions of oppression (gender, race, sexuality) in distinctly nonfunctionalist ways precisely because oppression is theorized as structurally relational to, and hence shaped by, capitalist production rather than on the margins of analysis or as add-ons to a deeper and more vital economic process. The essays in this volume thus explore questions of who constitutes the global working class today in all its chaotic, multiethnic, multigendered, differently abled subjectivity: what it means to bind class struggle theoretically to the point of production alone, without considering the myriad social relations extending between workplaces, homes, schools, hospitals — a wider social whole, sustained and coproduced by human labor in contradictory yet constitutive ways. Most importantly, they address the relationship between exploitation(normally tethered to class) and oppression (normally understood through gender, race, etc.) and reflect on whether this division adequately expresses the complications of an abstract level of analysis where we forge our conceptual equipment, and a concrete level of analysis, i.e., the historical reality where we apply those tools. Renewing Social Reproduction Theory in the Shadow of Neoliberalism Since the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009 and exacerbated by the government bailouts of those who perpetrated the crisis, there has emerged a renewed interest in Marx and Marxism. Major news sources of the Global North, from the New York Times to the Guardian and even to the conservative Foreign Policy have declared that Marx, without a doubt, “is back.” 3 Within this generalized interest, there has been a revival of more specific attention to Marx’s Capital. Even aside from Thomas Piketty’s 700-page Capital in the Twenty-First Centurybecoming a runaway bestseller, the period following 2008 has seen an unprecedented rise in scholarly publications on Marx’s seminal text. 4 While this is an unqualifiedly welcome development, there remains room — indeed, an urgency — to redraw the contours of some of these conversations about Capital in particular and its object of study, capitalism, in general. This book is an attempt to begin that process by highlighting the critical contribution of SRT to an understanding of capitalist social relations. There is a limited but rich literature by Marxists and feminists across disciplinary boundaries which has, since the 1980s, developed the insights of the social reproduction framework in very productive directions. 5 The republication in 2014 of Lise Vogel’s classic work Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory has given a new lease of life to this growing body of scholarship. While this literature embodies instantiations of SRT in a range of critical areas, there remains a need for a text that can act as a map and guide to this vivid and resonant body of work. Indeed, it is precisely because social reproduction scholars have so effectively applied and extended its theoretical insights to a diverse set of concerns in such creative ways that it is useful to compile and outline its key theoretical components along with its most significant historical applications. That said, this volume stands in a very specific relationship to the recent literature on oppression. We see our work as furthering the theoretical conversation with this existing body of scholarship in two kinds of ways: (a) as a conversation between Marxism and the study of specific oppressions such as gender and race, and (b) as developing a richer way of understanding how Marxism, as a body of thought, can address the relationship between theory and empirical studies of oppression. Let me elaborate. We make two central proposals in this volume about SRT: first, that it is a methodology to explore labor and labor power under capitalism and is best suited to offer a rich and variegated map of capital as a social relation; further, that this is a methodology that privileges process, or, to use Lukács’s words, we believe that the “developing tendencies of history constitute a higher reality than the empirical ‘facts.’” 6 Many recent studies similarly grapple with elaborating on these. Cinzia Arruzza, in her book Dangerous Liaisons (2013), offers a summary of the historic relationship between Marxism and feminism and tries to plot precisely where the tributaries of analysis about the system as a whole (capitalism) meet or diverge from analyses of categories produced by the system (gender and/or race). Arruzza’s work refuses the reduction of this complex dynamic to a simple question of “whether class comes before gender or gender before class,” but points the way toward thinking about how “gender and class intertwine in capitalist production.” 7 Similarly, Shahrzad Mojab, in her recently edited volume Marxism and Feminism (2015), alerts us to the actual dangers of theoretically severing the integrated relationship between class and gender. Contributors to Mojab’s volume show how decoupling feminism from capitalism carries the twin perils of emptying out the revolutionary content of feminism which “reduces gender to questions of culture” and of “reduc[ing] gender to class relations.” 8 A slightly older edited volume by Nancy Holmstrom (2002) likewise takes a integrative approach to the relationship between the oppression and the source of oppressions: capitalism. Holmstrom clarifies that although Marxism’s “basic theory” does not require “significant revision,” it does need to be “supplemented.” The volume thus seeks to champion a specific deployment of historical materialism that “gives a fuller picture of production and reproduction than Marx’s political economic theory does, that extends questions of democracy not only to the economy but to personal relations.” 9 Kate Benzanson and Meg Luxton’s edited collection Social Reproduction (2006) is perhaps the closest theoretical kin to our project. This is not solely because Benzanson and Luxton deal explicitly with SRT, but because they restore to it a “thick” description of the “economy” and “political process.” The volume is premised upon the understanding that “in capitalist societies the majority of people subsist by combining paid employment and unpaid domestic labor to maintain themselves . . . [hence] this version of social reproduction analyzes the ways in which both labors are part of the same socio-economic process.” 10 While Benzanson and Luxton problematize the concept of labor and the role it plays in the constitution and disruption of capitalism, Kathi Weeks (2011) has usefully drawn our attention to the most common articulation of labor under capitalism, namely, work. Weeks’s approach coincides with our own in that it is dissatisfied with efforts to align “work” with “a more equitable distribution of its rewards” — in other words, to think about how our working lives might be improved. Instead, Weeks points to the fundamental incommensurability of capitalism with any productive or creative sense of work. Hence her volume urges us to think about how the right to work and the right of refusal to work can be reimagined under the sign of an anticapitalist political theory. This brings us to how this volume, while in conversation with the above scholarship, is nonetheless about developing a set of theoretical concerns that are related but different. The contributing essays of the volume can be said, broadly, to do three kinds of work: determining the definitional contours of SRT, using SRT to develop and deepen Marxist theory, and exploring the strategic implications of applying SRT to our current conjuncture. It is to an elaboration of those themes that we now turn. Mapping Social Reproduction Theory: The Work of Definitions All the essays in this volume are in some way engaged in the task of sketching out the contours of what exactly social reproduction theory is and what kinds of questions it seeks to answer. In Marx’s own writing, the term social reproduction is most often deployed to refer to the reproduction of the capitalist system as a whole. Johanna Brenner and Barbara Laslett therefore suggest a useful distinction between societal and social reproduction, with the former retaining the original meaning as Marx has used it, and the latter referring to the activities and attitudes, behaviors and emotions, and responsibilities and relationships directly involved in maintaining life, on a daily basis and intergenerationally. It involves various kinds of socially necessary work—mental, physical, and emotional—aimed at providing the historically and socially, as well as biologically, defined means for maintaining and reproducing population. Among other things, social reproduction includes how food, clothing, and shelter are made available for immediate consumption, how the maintenance and socialization of children is accomplished, how care of the elderly and infirm is provided, and how sexuality is socially constructed. 11 The primary problematic of what is meant by the social reproduction of labor power is, however, only a preliminary start to this definitional project. Simply put, while labor puts the system of capitalist production in motion, SRT points out that labor power itself is the sole commodity — the “unique commodity,” as Marx calls it — that is produced outside of the circuit of commodity production. But this status of labor power as a commodity that is simultaneously produced outside the “normal” productive cycle of other commodities raises more questions than it answers. For instance, Marx is very clear that every commodity under capitalism has two manifestations: one as use value, the other as exchange value. Indeed, when the commodity appears in its social form we only encounter it in its second manifestation because the capitalist circulation process, through an act of “necromancy,” turns use value into its direct opposite. But labor power becomes a “commodity” (that is, it becomes something that is not simply endowed with use value) without going through the same process of “necromancy” as other commodities, which raises a question about the very ontology of labor power beyond the simple questions of its “production” and “reproduction.” If the totality of the capitalist system is shot through with this “commodity” that is not produced in the manner of other commodities, what then are the points of determination and/or contradictions that must necessarily be constitutive of the system, yet must be overcome within it? One way of resolving this problem is through a spatial understanding: that there are two separate but conjoined spaces — spaces of production of value (points of production) and spaces for reproduction of labor power. But then, as we gestured above, labor power is not simply replenished at home, nor is it always reproduced generationally. The family may form the site of individual renewal of labor power, but that alone does not explain “the conditions under which, and . . . the habits and degree of comfort in which” the working class of any particular society has been produced. 12 Public education and health care systems, leisure facilities in the community, and pensions and benefits for the elderly all compose together those historically determined “habits.” Similarly, generational replacement through childbirth in the kin-based family unit, although predominant, is not the only way a labor force may be replaced. Slavery and immigration are two of the most common ways capital has replaced labor in a bounded society. The complex concatenation of social relations making up the reproduction of labor power has led some theorists to define social reproduction to include “the processes necessary for the reproduction of the workforce, both biologically and as compliant wage workers.” 13 How can labor be made “compliant”? Relatedly, if labor power is a “unique” commodity in the sense of being produced noncapitalistically, then does that countervailing fact work against the manufacture of compliance? Susan Ferguson’s essay in this volume seeks to explore the dynamic, often contested relationship between capital and childhood. Ferguson takes us beyond the trope of consumerism under which capitalist childhoods are most often studied. Instead, she asks a more difficult question: “What exactly are capitalist productive relations? And how are children implicated in them?” (Emphasis mine.) While she argues that “capitalist productive relations determine the terrain upon which children and childhoods are produced and reproduced,” Ferguson avoids any functionalist correlation between capital’s vision of/need for children as pre-workers and the actual historical delineation of childhood. Instead, the essay illuminates the “deeply contradictory relationship between the social reproduction of children and childhoods, on the one hand, and the continued thriving and expansion of capital, on the other.” Like Walter Benjamin in his Berlin Childhood, Ferguson urges us to reconsider the child as a liminal, ambiguous figure, one capable of both compliance with capital and collusion with chthonic revolutionary energies. If under capitalism the child will always be a figuration of what could be, then the retired worker is perhaps, in capitalist terms, the termination of all possibilities. But a social reproduction framework that extends analysis beyond both wage labor and spaces of production suggests a more robust understanding of human labor. Serap Saritas Oran’s essay in this volume hence theorizes pensions as “not simply deferred wages or individual savings” but “from a political economy perspective.” Oran’s essay reframes the question of what constitutes labor power: is it composed of a set of use values represented by the labor time necessary for its production, or can we determine its value through its exchange value, or wage? She locates a lacuna in both approaches, for they fail to adequately theorize those goods and services that have “use value but not exchange value, such as reproductive household activities or state services” such as pensions. Since pensions are not necessarily commodities, nor do they correspond neatly with labor time; they cannot be considered the direct equivalent of an individual worker’s labor power during the worker’s work life. Oran thus urges us to look at pensions as “a component of the broader understanding of the value of labor power as a standard of living for the working class that consists of the payments and benefits necessary for generational social reproduction.” Theorizing pensions is one way to reveal the superficial nature of the neat spatial divisions between production (public) and reproduction (private), for the two separate spaces — spaces of production of value (point of production) and spaces for reproduction of labor power — while they may be separate in a strictly spatial sense are actually united in both the theoretical and operational senses. They are particular historical forms of appearance in which capitalism as a process posits itself. The question of separate spheres and why they are historical forms of appearance is an important one, and we will reflect upon it at length in this volume. One understanding of social reproduction is that it is about two separate spaces and two separate processes of production: the economic and the social — often understood as the workplace and home. In this understanding, the worker produces surplus value at work and hence is part of the production of the total wealth of society. At the end of the workday, because the worker is “free” under capitalism, capital must relinquish control over the process of regeneration of the worker and hence the reproduction of the workforce. The corpus of social relations involving regeneration — birth, death, social communication, and so on — is most commonly referred to in scholarly as well as policy literature as care or social care. If, as we propose, the spatial separation between production (public) and reproduction (private) is a historical form of appearance, then the labor that is dispensed in both spheres must also be theorized integratively. The classical Marxist example that outlines the relationship between the two forms of labor is Marx’s discussion of the working day. The reduction of the working day (time of production), for Marx, is the first step toward humanity developing any rudimentary notion of freedom or its own human potential. In the third volume of Capital he argues that “the realm of freedom really begins only where labor determined by necessity and external expediency ends... . . . the reduction of the working day is the basic prerequisite.” 14 Thus Marx famously describes the effects of alienation in the productive sphere, as “the worker . . . only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He is at home when he is not working, and when he is working he is not at home.” Some scholars have gone as far as to claim that concrete labor, as opposed to abstract labor, is nonalienated labor, as it is not producing for profit or exchange. 15 This sort of interpretation conflates the relationship between “work” and “leisure” in commonsensical terms with abstract and concrete labor in Marxist terms. For example, I may garden in my own yard during the weekend (concrete labor) and work at Starbucks during the week (abstract labor). Is this gardening then nonalienated? A strong reading of Marx may suggest otherwise. In my reading, along with the useful distinction between concrete and abstract labor, Marx is also proposing that our performance of concrete labor, too, is saturated/overdetermined by alienated social relations within whose overall matrix such labor must exist. Hence even my concrete labor (gardening) is not performed during and for a time of my own choosing or in forms that I can determine, but has to “fit in” with the temporal and objective necessities of other social relations. Indeed, if we go back to the epigraphs with which this essay begins, then it seems that the time after work (time of reproduction) is equally tedious. Lenin, usually not one to mince words, refers to the woman worker as a “domestic slave” precisely because “petty housework crushes, strangles, stultifies, and degrades her, chains her to the kitchen and the nursery, and she wastes her labor on barbarously unproductive, petty, nerve-wracking, stultifying and crushing drudgery.” 16 Was Marx then wrong, or simply sexist, to indicate this sphere as a point of departure for freedom? It is certainly true that Marx reserves both his developed theorization and his rage against the form that labor assumes in the sphere of production. 17 But since under capitalism the wage-labor relation “suffuses the spaces of nonwaged everyday life,” the time of reproduction must necessarily respond to the structuring impulses of the time of production. Structuring impulse, however, is not simple correspondence, and it is important to highlight this point — for, while capitalism limits our horizon of possibilities in both spheres, it simultaneously does have to relinquish absolute control over the time of reproduction. Marx recognizes this weak link of capitalism but, like many analytical categories of social reproduction, leaves it undertheorized. Consider his oft quoted statement about the bestiality of capitalist social relations. The worker, says Marx, no longer feels himself to be freely active in any but his animal functions—eating, drinking, procreating, or at most in his dwelling and in dressing-up, etc.; and in his human functions he no longer feels himself to be anything but an animal. 18 Certainly, Marx recognizes that “eating, drinking, procreating, etc., are also genuine human functions.” But “in the abstraction which separates them from the sphere of all other human activity” these activities are turned into their “sole and ultimate ends”: that is, they come to seem purely biological and, in that, they can be likened to animal functions. That abstraction is the conditioning impulse of wage labor. But there is more to this passage, for note how Marx states that the worker does feel “freely active” in her time away from production. From this Bertell Ollman correctly summarizes: Eating, drinking and procreating are occasions when all man’s powers may be fulfilled together; yet, in capitalism, they only serve their direct and most obvious functions as do their equivalents in the animal kingdom. Despite their depraved state, however, the individual exercises more choice in these activities than he does in those others, work in particular, which distinguish him as a human being. As unsatisfactory as eating and drinking are from a human point of view, the worker feels at least he is doing something he wants to do. The same cannot be said of his productive activity. 19 Capitalism, then, generates a set of two distinct relations that are nevertheless unified: the particular relations that adhere to production and to reproduction. Ollman’s description of Marx’s method is of use to us in addressing this contradictory unity. Marx’s practice, says Ollman, “of seeing the whole in the part links all particular relations together as aspects in the full unfolding of any one of them.” 20 Much more theoretical attention needs to be paid to the relationship between the physical body in all its acts (such as “eating, drinking and procreating”) and the social relationships of capital that such a body finds itself in. Insights from queer theory are useful in this regard to draw out how far the social implicates the physical and vice versa. Alan Sears’s essay in this volume grapples with a particular aspect of the physical-social question. Sears perceptively imbricates the horizons of sexual freedom with freedom from capitalism, thus making one the condition of possibility for the other. The essay shows why sexuality under capitalism is always-already organized as a “paradoxical double freedom, in which control over one’s own body is always combined with forms of compulsion.” Contradictory impulses of the capital-labor relation shape and mirror body-consciousness expressions, such as sexuality. Sears roots the paradoxes of capitalist sexuality, the constant shadow dance between freedom and repression in a systemic contradiction: Members of the working class are free in that they own their own bodies, yet are subjected to systemic compulsion because they must sell their capacity to work in order to gain access to the basic requirement for subsistence. The combination of consent and compulsion that underlies basic labor relations under capitalism also shapes the realities of sexual freedom within the bounds of that system. Nancy Fraser’s essay similarly theorizes this constitutive and contradictory impulse that is indicative of capitalism as a system. While the neoliberal moment is marked by a crisis of social provisioning, Fraser challenges the notion that this is simply a “crisis of care” or a crisis of “the capacities available for birthing and raising children, caring for friends and family members, maintaining households and broader communities, and sustaining connections more generally.” Instead Fraser offers a much darker thesis that this is a generalized crisis of the system’s ability to reproduce itself, brought on by the depletion and decimation of social reproductive functions. The crises evidenced in care work, then, is “not accidental but have deep systemic roots in the structure of our social order.” They have been generated and accelerated by “unlimited accumulation” that “tends to destabilize the very processes of social reproduction on which it relies.” Fraser, like many other contributors to the volume, offers us a deeply gendered vision of capital, one in which the resolution to the crisis of care can only proceed by way of a resolution of the inherent injustice of the system as a whole and “requires reinventing the production/reproduction distinction and reimagining the gender order.” This line of theorization about the nature of waged and unwaged labor also touches upon critical branches of feminist thought and activism, the most prominent of course being the wages-for-housework movement. Carmen Teeple Hopkins’s essay discusses the important contributions of scholar-activists such as Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Selma James, and Silvia Federici and addresses the theoretical challenge that autonomist feminists posed to the Marxist schema of social reproduction. 21 Teeple Hopkins’s study of immigrant domestic workers in Montreal adds another layer of theoretical questions to the complex issue of domestic labor. She argues that while we owe the autonomist feminists “a debt of gratitude” for their serious consideration of housework, we need to have a renewed conversation about the very category of “care” in an age where care is increasingly becoming commodified and sold on the market for a price. Here, Teeple Hopkins denaturalizes paid care work in two important ways. The first is by reminding us that such work takes very specific forms under the current conjuncture, in that it is mostly performed by “working-class women of color and migrant workers,” a fact that rightly locates “race and citizenship status” as central determinants of both societal and social reproduction. Second, her essay places the racialization process in its historical context of “unpaid labor of enslaved African American women during US slavery” and the “ paid domestic labor that many African American women performed in the post-slavery period,” thereby putting the “recognized social reproduction canon” in a productive dialogue with Black feminist writing. One challenge to defining SRT is a more literal one. The content of this volume deals with issues (such as domestic labor and the informal economy) that have been addressed under theoretical rubrics other than social reproduction, such as anthropology, labor studies, and certain his- toriographic traditions, such as subaltern history. Should we continue to think of this tradition specifically as a social reproduction framework or should we think more broadly? This raises an important question that goes to the heart of what this theoretical tradition stands for as well as its scope. Social reproduction theorists, who by no means represent a unified political or theoretical tradition, are generally concerned with one particular aspect of the reproduction of the capitalist production cycle as a whole. Marx famously concentrates on the cycle of production of commodities to show how surplus value is produced through this process of or production undertheorized (M – the C (Mp,Lp) – P – C' – M'). 22 He leaves undeveloped or undertheorized the production and reproduction of labor power. It is this part of the total reproduction of the system that is of concern to social reproduction theorists. In this sense, it is perhaps more accurate to think of this theoretical tradition as a series of reflections on the political economy of labor power, a recasting of the labor theory of value from the point of view of wage labor (as opposed to from the side of capital). Nevertheless, I believe, social reproduction theory, as a term, still carries an important analytical charge to which we should be attentive. First, it is not simply an attempt to explore the relationship between social relations established through the market and extramarket social relations. It represents an effort to develop Marx’s labor theory of value in a specific direction. SRT is primarily concerned with understanding how categories of oppression (such as gender, race, and ableism) are coproduced in simultaneity with the production of surplus value. In this aspect, it seeks to overcome reductionist or deterministic representations of Marxism while at the same time creatively exposing the organic totality of capitalism as a system. It is important thus to retain the term social reproduction theory, as it declares its heritage to be within the Marxist tradition. Second, several new terms have been in circulation among social theorists to describe the sphere of extramarket relations. Moral economy, shadow economy, the social factory, and the unwaged work sector are among some of the terms employed. 23 SRT is unique in the sense that it theorizes the relationship between the market and extramarket relations rather than simply gesturing toward their distinction. Mapping Social Reproduction Theory: Defending a Theory of Totality Following from above, a basic element that troubles the relationship between market and nonmarket categories is surely the thorny problem of reality itself. For instance, the reality I can see tells me that the worker and her boss are fundamentally and juridically equal, and the difference in their wages or life situations are the consequence of personal choices. Similarly, a slightly darker version of the same reality tells me that, because white workers in the Global North typically earn more than workers of color, there can never be common grounds of struggle uniting them, as the very real, material, empirically documented difference between them will always fuel white racism. The same can be said about the real material differences between men and women. What is interesting about these very real situations is that to try to challenge them within the context set by capitalism — or capitalist reality — would have two consequences: either failure (for example, as in the numerous historical instances where sexism and/or racism overwhelm or choke the workers’ movement) or a political strategy that seeks to overcome such differences of race/gender between workers by moral appeals, asking people to “do the right thing” even if it is not in their immediate interest to do so: Even though the male worker earns more than his female counterpart, he ought to join in a struggle on her behalf because it is the right thing to do, even if it does not further his own interests. In contrast to this vision of the world and politics, Marx argues that to try to act upon our world on the basis of an empirical or factual knowledge of reality, as it is perceived, involves a category mistake. Instead, he presents us with a more disconcerting idea: that the reality we perceive is only the partial truth, and that it appears to us in a particular, historically specific form. Capital concerns itself with demonstrating this “difference between everyday experience of the surface phenomena determined by the prevailing mode of production and a scientific analysis of which goes beneath this surface to grasp an essence.” 24 We thus need “science” to fully grasp the phenomena that remain hidden behind this appearance of the real. But as Ben Fine and Laurence Harris have reminded us, the hidden phenomena are not “simply there waiting to be found.” Indeed, it is the task of science to forge tools so as to produce “concepts appropriate to these hidden phenomena” and knowledge that explains how such phenomena give rise to and determine the specific appearance of reality. 25 To develop this further: What is the logic of the relationship between us (subjects) and empirically apprehended facts (objects)? Empirical appearances, then, do not simply shroud some unspoiled “truth” or essence. There is, rather, a relationship between hidden phenomena and empirical appearance. “The question then becomes,” as Lukács puts it, are the empirical facts — (it is immaterial whether they are purely “sensuous” or whether their sensuousness is only the ultimate material substratum of their “factual” essence) — to be taken as “given” or can this “givenness” be dissolved further into rational forms, i.e. can it be conceived as the product of “our” reason? As far as SRT is concerned, we can draw two important conclusions from this discussion: first, that the way reality appears in all its racialized and gendered form is neither accidental nor complete; and second, that our tools to understand that reality can neither consist of a rejection of said empirical facts nor a simple aggregation of them. Instead, following Marx, we ought to think of reality or the “concrete” as “concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse.” David McNally’s essay approaches intersectionality theory from this understanding of a concrete totality to explore whether intersectionality is an adequate tool, or the science we need, to expose the hidden phenomena that shape our apprehension of reality and whether such a theory can explain the relationship between the diverse “real” elements that form a unified “concentration of many determinations.” While McNally acknowledges at the outset the “deep theoretical flaws” of intersectionality theory, his essay is particularly notable for its rejection of dualist (often pugilist) approaches to the problem. While many recent debates around the efficacy of intersectionality as a theoretical tool pit it against Marxism or SRT, this essay situates it analytically as a body of critical thought. For instance, to take just one example out of many, a left that ignores Patricia Hill Collins’s detailed study of postwar racism in the United States does so at the risk of its own impoverishment; Hill Collins draws a masterful picture of “globalization, transnationalism, and the growth of hegemonic ideologies within mass media [that] provide the context for a new racism that has catalyzed changes within African, Black American, and African-Diasporic societies.” 26 McNally thus begins by acknowledging the rich empirical work done by scholars of intersectionality that arose in response to inadequate scholarly attention to race as a central dynamic of capitalism. But how should we situate these empirical data in our understanding of reality? Martha Gimenez points out that Marx, in one of his rare methodological propositions, argues that if we started our investigations from aspects of social reality that seem to us the most concrete and real, like say, the family, then we would in fact be beginning with “a very vague notion of a complex whole.” Instead, Marx suggests that we produce knowledge about reality when we advance from such “imaginary concrete concepts” (the family, childcare, etc.) to “increasingly simple concepts” or abstractions (such as, for example, domestic labor). Such abstractions then have to be investigated at an empirical level, keeping in mind their historic conditions of production and thereby their limits. But then a reverse theoretical movement must take place. We must return to the phenomena we started out with, but now they can be understood as “a totality comprising many determinations and relations.” The concept is now a “real concrete” because it is “a synthesis of many definitions, thus representing the unity of diverse aspects.” 27 Intersectionality theory, however, shows us a world where race, gender, and other oppressions “intersect,” thereby producing a reality that is latticed — a sum total of different parts. At first glance this “whole,” as an aggregate of different parts, may appear to be the same as the Hegelian-Marxist concept of totality. An elementary question about the nature of intersections, however, reveals the distinction between the two concepts. If, as intersectionality theory tells us, race and gender intersect like two streets, then surely they are two separate streets, each with its own specificities? What, then, is the logic of their intersection? I suggest that the insights or conclusions of intersectional theorists actually contradict their methodology. Instead of race and gender being separate systems of oppression or even separate oppressions with only externally related trajectories, the findings of Black feminist scholars show how race and gender are actually co-constitutive. Intersectionality theory’s methodology belies its own findings, for its theoretical model, as McNally shows, is a social Newtonian one — of discrete parts colliding, intersecting, or interlocking to produce a combined, an externally related whole. In contrast, McNally’s essay is a powerful discussion of how SRT offers us a way to “retain and reposition” the insights of intersectionality, yet reject its theoretical premise of an aggregative reality. The understanding of totality as an organic whole rather than an aggregate of parts is important precisely because it has real material implications for how we must choose to act upon that world. Are struggles against racism and sexism internally or externally related? Does the white worker have a material, not moral, interest in challenging racism? The next section is about how and why, in a praxis-predicated philosophy such as Marxism, what we theoretically determine has strategic import in the lived experience of our world. Mapping Social Reproduction Theory: Strategy as a Heuristic Principle How can our theoretical understanding about whether production and reproduction belong to separate processes impinge upon our ways of grasping the nature of labor as well as its organizational impulses? The materials necessary to produce the worker in the image of her own needs and goals — be they food, housing, “time for education, for intellectual development” or the “free play of his [or her] own physical and mental powers” — cannot be realized within the capitalist production process, for the process as a whole exists for the valorization of capital and not the social development of labor. 28 Thus the worker, due to the very nature of the process, is always-already reproduced as lacking in what she needs. Hence the struggle for higher wages (or, to call it by its more agentive name, class struggle) is built into the fabric of wage labor as a form. Here we arrive at the strategic implications of SRT, or how an integrative sense of capitalism is central to our actual battles against capital. In this volume we approach the question of class struggle from this standpoint in order to address the conceptual and strategic totality of workplace struggle, along with struggle that erupts away from the point of production. My own essay theoretically explores the analytical category and historical processes of “class formation.” While it is easy to state that workers have an existence outside of the circuit of commodity production or point of production, the challenge the essay takes up is to clarify “the relationship between this existence and that of their productive lives under the direct domination” of capital, for that relation between spheres has the potential to chart the path of class struggle. Similarly, Salar Mohandesi and Emma Teitelman’s essay is based on a longue durée approach to class struggle upon what they call the “terrain of social reproduction” in the United States. Tracing a counterintuitive history of labor struggles in the early twentieth century, Mohandesi and Teitelman show how the work of life-production — “household budgeting, food shopping, managing household needs” — acquired a new political charge in this period in response to earnings from wage labor emerging as the dominant component of total household income. Whereas, in previous decades, keeping animals in the backyard or growing vegetables in family plots had always supplemented wage earnings for families, the expansion and consolidation of the social relations of capital undermined or even outlawed such practices, eventually forcing households to become primarily dependent on wage labor. As the activities to reproduce life (unwaged) and the activities to produce commodities (waged) grew to be strictly separated and the latter began to determine the former, “rent, food, and cost of living” developed as “key points of contestation that inspired a variety of actions, such as boycotts, rent strikes, and the organization of cooperatives.” Mohandesi and Teitelman’s rich account of the past allows us to review our current political conjuncture through the framework of SRT, for the present moment is a map of political protest that is united in its extreme unevenness, where militant workplace strikes (China and India) are combined with political struggles against various forms of dispossession (water rights in Ireland, land rights in Latin America) and forms of oppression (the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States). Cinzia Arruzza’s contribution to the volume is a vibrant instantiation of SRT in practice. As one of the national organizers of International Women’s Strike on March 8, 2017, Arruzza brings to the volume a productive urgency. Her essay, on the one hand, outlines the theoretical framework that informed the national mobilization for the strike; on the other, it boldly rejects what Engels once called “specific tactics of hushing up the class struggle.” Indeed, the political methods of the Women’s Strike, Arruzza shows, could be one of our lineaments of hope. SRT, then, offers us an opportunity to reflect upon the manifold ways that the neoliberal moment has forced us to reassess the potency and efficacy of certain previously uncontested terms in the Marxist tradition. Conceptual categories such as “class,” the “economy,” or even the “working class” can no longer be filled with the historical data of the nineteenth century that were available to Marx. This does not invalidate them as categories. Instead, our own historical moment demands that we engage rigorously with these categories and make them represent our own politico-historic totality. SRT is especially useful in this regard because it reveals the essence-category of capitalism, its animating force, to be human labor and not commodities. In doing so, it exposes to critical scrutiny the superficiality of what we commonly understand to be “economic” processes and restores to the economic process its messy, sensuous, gendered, raced, and unruly component: living human beings, capable of following orders as well as of flouting them. Like all worthwhile Marxist projects, it is important to state that this project to develop SRT is both ongoing and collective. It is ongoing in the sense that our understanding of Marxism ought to be paradigmatic rather than prescriptive, where we see Marxism as a framework or tool to understand social relations and thereby change them. This means, necessarily, that such a tool will sometimes need to be sharpened and honed to fit new, emerging social realities. The revolutionary Marxist tradition has always used Marxism in this manner, which has allowed it to rejuvenate and add to itself in new moments of crises. Lenin’s theory of imperialism, Luxemburg’s understanding of the mass strike, and Trotsky’s thesis on the permanent revolution are all examples of this constant revivification of Marxism in different epochs because these thinkers employed the Marxist method to understand the social reality of their own time. The present volume is similarly animated by this sense of the historical materialist approach as, essentially, a method of analysis that applies itself to concrete historical situations. As the global neoliberal economy continues to foreclose real living alternatives for the vast majority and centers of resistance start developing from within its matrix, we hope SRT will continue to develop Marxism as a real tool for understanding our world in order to change it. Such a project must also, of necessity, be collaborative. So we see this as the start of a conversation about SRT, one that will contribute to and continue that tradition of practicing critical thinking in open and exploratory ways to combat the challenges of our sly and dangerous times. While this book is very much about excavating and recuperating the revolutionary Marxist tradition from the past, like Ernst Bloch, we reserve our greatest excitement for the “not yet.” Notes 1. Susan Ferguson, “Capitalist Childhood, Anti-Capitalist Children: The Social Reproduction of Childhood,” unpublished paper, 2015. 2. Meg Luxton, “Feminist Political Economy in Canada and the Politics of Social Reproduction,” in Social Reproduction: Feminist Political Economy Challenges Neoliberalism, edited by Kate Bezanson and Meg Luxton (Montréal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006), 36. 3. “Marx Is Back” was the headline for Foreign Policy (January 21, 2014), while the Guardianled with “Why Marxism Is on the Rise Again” (July 4, 2012), the New York Times with “Marx Rises Again” (April 19, 2014), and Salon.com “Believe It or Not: Karl Marx Is Making a Comeback” (June 22, 2014). 4. These include, among others: Elmar Altvater, Marx neu entdecken (Rediscovering Marx) (Hamburg: VSA Verlag, 2012); David Harvey’s A Companion to Marx’s Capital (New York: Verso, 2010) and A Companion to Marx’s Capital Volume 2 (New York: Verso, 2013), Wolfgang Fritz Haug, Das Kapital lesen—aber Wie? Materialien (Reading Capital—But How? Materials) (Hamburg: Argument-Verlag/Ariadne, 2013), the English translation of Michael Heinrich’s introductory book to Capital: An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Marx’s Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2012), originally published in German in 2004; Fredric Jameson, Representing Capital: A Reading of Volume One (New York: Verso, 2011); Alex Callinicos, Deciphering Capital (London: Bookmarks, 2014). 5. This literature is too vast to be reported in its entirety here, but some key representational texts are: Veronica Beechey, Unequal Work (New York: Verso, 1987); Dorothy Smith, “Feminist Reflections on Political Economy,” Studies in Political Economy 30 (1987); Johanna Brenner, Women and the Politics of Class (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000); Antonella Picchio, Social Reproduction: The Political Economy of the Labor Market (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); and work by Canadian Marxists such as Heather Jon Maroney, Bonnie Fox, Kate Bezanson, and Isabella Bakker. 6. György Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 181. 7. Cinzia Arruza, Dangerous Liaisons (London: Merlin, 2013), 128. 8. Shahrzad Mojab, ed., Marxism and Feminism (London: Zed Books, 2015). 9. Nancy Holmstrom, ed., The Socialist Feminist Project: A Contemporary Reader in Theory and Politics (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2002), 7. 10. Kate Benzanson and Meg Luxton, eds., Social Reproduction (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006), 37, emphasis mine. 11. Johanna Brenner and Barbara Laslett, “Gender, Social Reproduction, and Women’s Self-Organization: Considering the US Welfare State.” Gender & Society 5, no. 3 (1991): 314. 12. Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1 (Washington, DC: Gateway Editions, 1996),139. 13. Ben Fine and Alfredo Saad-Filho, Marx’s ‘Capital,’ 6th ed. (London: Pluto,2017), 60. 14. Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 3 (London: Penguin, 1981), 959. 15. John Holloway, Crack Capitalism (London: Pluto Press, 2010). 16. V.I. Lenin, “A Great Beginning,” Collected Works, Vol. XXIX (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1965 [March–August 1919]), 429. 17. As Ollman points out, given that Marx variously described capitalist labor “as ‘torment,’ a ‘sacrifice of life’ and ‘activity as suffering,’ it is not to be wondered at that no one in capitalism works unless he is forced.” Bertell Ollman, Alienation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 141. 18. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1959), 69. 19. Bertell Ollman, Alienation: Marx’s Conception of Man in Capitalist Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 141. 20. Ibid. 21. For more details, see Bonnie Fox, ed., Hidden in the Household: Women’s Domestic Labor Under Capitalism (New York: Women’s Press, 1980); Maxine Molyneux, “Beyond the Domestic Labor Debate,” New Left Review 116 (1979). 22. In which money (M) is exchanged for commodities (C), that is, a combination of means of production (Mp) and labor power (Lp). The two elements combine through capitalist production (P) to produce new commodities and surplus value (C') to be then exchanged for a greater amount of money (M'). 23. For details, see George Caffentzis, “On the Notion of a Crisis of Social Reproduction,” in Letters of Blood and Fire: Work, Machines and the Crisis of Capitalism (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2013). 24. Philip J. Kain, Marx and Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 160. 25. Ben Fine and Laurence Harris, Rereading Capital (London and Basingstoke: McMillan Press, 1983), 6. 26. Patricia Hill Collins, Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender and the New Racism(New York: Routledge, 2004), 65. 27. Quoted in M. Dobb, “Introduction,” in Karl Marx, Appendix to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970 [1857]), 206. 28. Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, 284.

By Kelly Wilson On my first day as a practicing attorney, my then-boss suggested I read Daring Greatly by Brene Brown, a very on trend book at the moment. What’s funny is that I actually already had the book and had decided it wasn’t for me after Chapter 1. If you aren’t already familiar, The Wall […]

These ideas could help design a system that keeps these materials from becoming trash in the first place.

By Lance Selfa, International Socialist Project, January 13, 2020 Karl Kautsky 1854-1938. Photograph, early 20th century For those on the revolutionary left, Karl Kautsky seemed like little more than an historical figure. Someone whom your Marxist education would expose you to, but someone you’d never think would become a reference point for contemporary politics. Times have changed, especially with the political and academic interventions of Lars Lih and Eric Blanc. Both of them have tried to rehabilitate Kautsky as an historical figure, and Blanc and his co-thinkers in the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) Momentum/Bread and Roses/Socialist Call groups have argued for Kautsky’s utility to socialists today. For both writers, Kautsky is deployed as the antidote to a received Leninist wisdom. In Lih’s case, he’s trying to argue that Lenin’s conception of the party, even of revolution, wasn’t much of a departure from what Kautsky had established as Marxist orthodoxy for years. I won’t say much more about this, as others here have done more work on Lih’s (very long) books than I have. For Blanc, what we’re getting is a more full-blown defense of Kautsky’s conception of “democratic socialism” as the only viable way to achieve socialism today. This is where I’d like to focus. When I remember what I learned about Karl Kautsky in texts like John Molyneux’s Marxism and the Party and What is the Real Marxist Tradition?, I can summarize it in a few points. I would also encourage anyone interested in learning about Kautsky’s politics to read Darren Rosso’s excellent summary and critique in Marxist Left Review. First, Kautsky, the “Pope of Marxism,” was something of a pedant and not a very original thinker who did nonetheless produce some interesting work, like his writings about the origins of Christianity. Second, that he was the chief practitioner of “Second International Marxism.” He outlined a conception of the transition to socialism as being mainly parliamentary and, just as importantly, as some(1thing of an inevitable process of the evolution of capitalism. As capitalism developed, it would create a larger working class that would form larger and larger organizations like the unions and the Social Democratic Party (SPD), which would lead to a point where the working class would be so strong that it could elect socialism into power. This sort of view is what Walter Benjamin and Daniel Ben-Said called the “unilinear” view of history. It’s the sort of view that radicals like Labriola, Gramsci and Mariátegui broke with when they adopted a view of Marxism as a “philosophy of praxis.” The SPD’s 1891 Erfurt program and Kautsky’s commentaries on it reaffirm his parliamentary focus over and over, including the analysis that the character of the state and parliament changes when workers parties are represented there. If the workers’ party becomes the parliamentary majority, the nature of parliament itself changes. No longer is parliament simply an instrument of the ruling class, as Marx and Engels had argued. It could become an instrument of the working class. Parliament was the natural “battleground” where the “last decisive battle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie can be fought,” Kautsky wrote. Third, that his conception of the socialist party was that it was a “revolutionary party,” in that was dedicated to socialism, but not a “revolution making” party that would intervene in the struggle to organize new forces and to shape events to bring revolution a more likely outcome. As he put it in The Road to Power (1909): We know that our objectives can be attained only through a revolution, but at the same time we know that it is just as little in our power to make this revolution as it is in the power of our opponents to prevent it…. The proletariat is constantly growing in numbers and in moral and economic strength… so its victory and the defeat of capitalism are inevitable. This was the difference between the Second International parties that were largely electoral, but which had “minimum” and “maximum” programs, and the “parties of a new type” that the Bolsheviks and the early communist parties represented.1 Fourth, that he developed a politics of the “center” that combined radical/revolutionary rhetoric with reformist practice. That’s a crude definition of centrism that in a Marxist sense, describes a political current vacillating between reform and revolution. For most of Kautsky’s career, he was something of a literary centrist, often justifying a passive evolutionary politics with orthodox Marxism. But in real terms up to and after the First World War, he became a leading figure among the “independent” socialists, who broke from the main body of the SPD over its policies around the war. But whereas Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht and other radicals “passed through” the Independent Socialists on their way to forming the Communist Party (KPD), Kautsky wanted nothing more than a reunification of the independents and the mainstream SPD after the war, when they could both return to the humdrum of parliamentary and trade union politics. Fifth, that he became a “renegade” from Marxism as a vocal opponent of the 1917 Russian Revolution, and an exponent of politics that were largely considered to have failed, especially around the question of the First World War. That’s most likely why Trotsky, in his short obituary of Kautsky in 1938, notes that very few paid attention to his death. Trotsky feels obligated to explain why Kautsky was considered an important figure in Marxism before the First World War. Incidentally, despite what Lars Lih claims, our tradition never denied that Lenin considered Kautsky to be the leading theoretician of Marxism after Marx/Engels. But we were also clear that Lenin made a sharp break with Kautsky. As Trotsky wrote, “We remember Kautsky as our former teacher to whom we once owed a good deal, but who separated himself from the proletarian revolution and from whom, consequently, we had to separate ourselves.” In the end, Kautsky is not a very complicated figure to understand, and his theory is pretty straightforward. He obviously changed positions on various issues over the course of his 50 years on the public stage, but there remains a large amount of consistency in his outlook throughout. One of his biographers, Massimo Salvadori, whose Karl Kautsky and the Socialist Revolution 1880-1938 is well worth reading, went all the way back to something Kautsky wrote on the nature of parliamentary democracy and “direct legislation” in 1893. With this example, Salvadori showed how Kautsky held to certain core views throughout his career. Chief among these was the idea that modern capitalism required a technical/bureaucratic caste of experts to run it—rejecting the revolutionary idea that “every cook can govern”—and that because of this, the state could not be “smashed” or replaced, but only governed differently. Salvadori writes: Central to Kautsky’s analysis was the conviction that the model of 1848 and the [1871] Paris Commune could no longer serve to advance workers’ interests in a social context dominated by large-scale capitalism; it could inspire neither greater offensive actions by labour, nor the construction of a socialist state. The coherence of his interpretation of this position led inevitably to his clash with Lenin’s rehabilitation of the revolutionary spirit of 1848 and 1871.”2 This is, hopefully, a good backdrop for the discussion of the recent exchange between Eric Blanc and Mike Taber on Kautsky’s relevance to socialists today. What is at stake is socialists’ understanding of what socialism is and how to get it to it. Was Kautsky right or wrong? Blanc states his defense of Kautsky and his relevance today on several points: Kautsky was the preeminent advocate of a “ruptural” anticapitalist strategy in the prewar Second International. His argument with Leninists wasn’t about the goal of socialism, but about the means to get there. The means he advocated was the election of a workers’ government to parliament. Kautsky’s politics failed in the run-up to the war because he, like Rosa Luxemburg, didn’t fully understand the nature and conservatizing force of the trade union bureaucracy. When he was forced to confront this fact, he ultimately surrendered to it. Kautsky rejected an “insurrectionary” strategy because he realized that it wasn’t relevant in modern democratic capitalism. It may have worked in tsarist Russia, but not in quasi-democratic Germany. And history has proven Kautsky correct. Since the Leninist strategy doesn’t work, Leninists have concentrated their fire on Kautskyians for not seeing the dangers of trying to take over or run the existing bourgeois state. This isn’t true. Kautsky advocated getting rid of the standing army and the general strike if the bourgeoisie threatened to take away workers’ democratic rights. Kautsky didn’t think the working class could just take over the state. It would have to thoroughly democratize the state from top to bottom. Blanc compares Kautsky’s views of democratizing the German state to Marx’s views on the Paris Commune. Kautsky’s conception proved out in the Finnish revolution of 1917-1918, but it hasn’t been tried much since. That’s in part due to the left’s refusal/inability to connect extraparliamentary struggle with electoral campaigns, a deficiency the left is now overcoming through campaigns like those of Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC). Blanc’s conclusions are also worth noting here. Reevaluating Kautsky’s contributions allows the left to: Break from dogmatism rooted in generalizing the 1917 experience of the Russian Revolution. His chief example of the break with this form of dogmatism is the left’s willingness to use the Democratic Party ballot line. Appreciate better the importance for fighting for democratic rights. Take the electoral arena more seriously, as noted earlier in the mentions of Sanders and AOC. Summarizing these points makes clear just how much Blanc’s views on Kautsky are tied to his acceptance of and advocacy for pro-Democratic Party reformist politics. Mike Taber does a good job of responding to Blanc. Taber’s strongest points are as follows: First, he points out that Blanc wants to divide Kautsky’s career into an earlier period of the revolutionary “good” Kautsky, and the later, post-First World War centrist “bad” Kautsky. But as Taber shows, with the illustration of Kautsky’s views on whether socialists should take positions in capitalist governments (the so-called “Millerand” controversy), that even the “good” Kautsky had a tendency to make the formally orthodox argument, but to accommodate to opportunism in practice. In the Millerand example, Kautsky argued against socialist participation in capitalist governments in general, but conceded that in exceptional circumstances, such participation might be acceptable. It wasn’t a question of principle, but of strategy. When the SPD experienced its first major electoral setback in 1907, following an election in which questions of imperialism and militarism dominated, Kautsky retreated on earlier positions that hinted at revolutionary opposition to the outbreak of war. As Salvadori writes, “[Kautsky] indicated a road of opposition to the war based on ideological agitation, without any sort of action that could be construed as extra-legal (strikes, demonstrations, etc.). Kautsky’s approach remained essentially legalistic, fearful of any action that might endanger the official existence of the party.”3 This was essentially the policy of the SPD leadership. Writing in The Social Revolution (1902), the “good” Kautsky spelled out his view of the relationship of parliament to socialism in this way: The more, however, that the ruling classes support themselves with the State machinery and misuse this for the purposes of exploitation and oppression, just so much more must the bitterness of the proletariat against them increase, class hatred grow, and the effort to conquer the machinery of State increase in intensity. So the candle is burning from both ends, and the ruling parties as well as the government more and more doom Parliament to sterility. Parliamentarism is continually more incapable of following a decisive policy in any direction. It becomes ever more senile and helpless, and can only be reawakened to new youth and strength when it, together with the total governmental power, is conquered by the rising proletariat and turned to serve its purposes. Parliamentarism, far from making a revolution useless and superfluous, is itself in need of a revolution in order to vivify it.[my emphasis] In this passage, it’s almost as if socialism is the servant of parliamentarism, rather than its negation. Kautsky’s position stands opposed to that of revolutionary socialists who see parliament as part of the capitalist state, and therefore, aim to replace it with organs of workers’ democracy. Second, Taber shows that Blanc’s characterizations of “insurrection” and “Leninism” are caricatures. As he writes, the Leninist model/theory of revolution is to organize and mobilize the working class to fight for its class interests and to the overthrow of the ruling class. Many strategies and tactics would be used in this battle—including utilizing parliamentary elections—so to say that there is a “Leninist strategy of insurrection” is wrong. Even more ridiculous is the idea that Leninists/communists haven’t paid sufficient attention to the fight for democratic rights, of which more can be said. Third, Blanc’s contention that the Bolshevik revolution only succeeded because Russia was a feudal monarchy is wrong, Taber argues. The regime the October revolution overthrew was a capitalist government. It hadn’t yet established a functioning parliamentary wing, but there was an expression of a much higher level of workers’ democracy, the soviets, in operation at the time. So it is inaccurate to assert that there were no democratic rights or practices in Russia at the time of the October revolution. This “East” versus “West” comparison is fundamental to Blanc’s anti-Leninism. His argument in favor of Kautskyism or “democratic socialism,” hinges on the notion that no socialist revolution has succeeded in a Western parliamentary democracy. Revolution, a la Lenin, is associated with political and economic backwardness—a position Kautsky held as well. Not only is the modern parliamentary state stronger and more technically superior to any forces that would challenge it from below, workers have never actually demonstrated an interest in replacing parliamentary regimes with workers democracy. Quoting the once radical sociologist Carmen Siriani, Blanc contends that “even when a desire for immediate socialist transformation was deepest among working people, support to replace universal suffrage and parliamentary democracy with workers’ councils, or other organs of dual power, has always remained marginal.” Two responses to this are in order. First, if this is merely saying that a revolutionary position is a minority position in the workers’ movement even when a revolution is unfolding, Blanc is not saying anything of which “Leninists” aren’t aware. In fact, it took from February to October, 1917, for the majority of the working class to move from a position of support for the capitalist provisional government to support for a soviet state. Second, and more importantly, Blanc doesn’t acknowledge the multiple examples of workers creating organs of direct democracy and/or conditions of dual power that have taken place since the Russian Revolution. In the old Comintern debate on “soviets” vs. “parliament,” Blanc stands (with Kautsky) clearly on the side of parliament. Taber also points out that revolutionaries’ assertion of the impossibility of a “parliamentary road to socialism” doesn’t preclude socialists using electoral tactics. Nor does it rule out the possibility that the election of a left government will create a revolutionary situation, as happened in Spain in the 1930s or Chile in the 1970s, or (as Blanc highlights), happened in Finland in 1917-1918. On the question of democratic rights and revolution, Taber somewhat lets Blanc off the hook. Or, at least, he could have made a stronger case against Blanc. It’s true that the “good” Kautsky did talk about democracy as being essential to help the working class to prepare itself for social revolution. But as with many things with Kautsky, the rhetoric didn’t always line up with practice. For one thing, again, Kautsky’s view of “social revolution” was really one of a socialist government coming to power in parliament. His advocacy of a militia replacing the standing army was the mainstream policy of the SPD, as it existed in a state dominated by Prussian militarism. And his talk about democratizing the state was really more about making all levels of government subject to election…not the idea of organs of workers’ government replacing the capitalist state. But the biggest missed opportunity4 in Taber’s critique of Blanc comes in his failure to raise Kautsky’s 1910 position on the general strike in Prussia when Rosa Luxemburg, and then workers agitation, demanded it to abolish the three-class system of voting that was designed to blunt “one-person, one-vote” for the working class majority. In other words, to demand a democratic republic, which had been a long-time goal, even raison d’être, of Prussian social democracy. Kautsky argued that the time wasn’t right, that it could provoke the state to crack down, and, in any event, the workers’ movement should keep its powder dry for the 1912 elections. Kautsky elaborated further that, unlike his brief post-1905 Russian revolution interest in the mass strike, he thought this was a tactic that couldn’t be translated from backward Russia to advanced Germany. In his polemic against Luxemburg, he introduces the idea of the “strategy of annihilation” contrasted to the “strategy of attrition.” In brief, he argues that the strategy of annihilation—the frontal assault on the state—may have been appropriate under Tsarism, but the patient, slow, strategy of attrition is only one available to socialists in democratic countries. Essentially this is Eric Blanc’s argument. And in case someone tries to argue that this is a formulation of the “bad” Kautsky, it’s worth quoting Kautsky at length: [B]y a strategy of attrition I mean the entirety of the practice pursued by the social democratic proletariat since the 1860s.… this practice begins with the assumption that the war against the present state and the present society must be waged in such a way as to constantly strengthen the proletariat and weaken its enemies, without allowing the decisive battle to be provoked so long as we are the weaker. We are served by anything that disorganizes our enemies and undermines their authority and combativity, just as anything that contributes to organizing the proletariat, that widens its horizons and combativity, increases the confidence of the popular masses in their organizations. This applies not only to parliamentarism, but also to the movement for wage increases and to street demonstrations that are conducted successfully.5 As with so much of Kautsky’s writing, the rhetoric is hard to disagree with. But the concrete circumstances where this rhetoric is deployed point towards compromise and opportunism. Any socialist wants to develop the organization, combativity and confidence of the working class. Yet, this passage comes in a polemic in which these goals are being counterposed to a genuine mass struggle right under Kautsky’s nose. As it turned out, the 1910 party congress passed a resolution affirming the tactic of the general strike to fight for democratic rights, but stripped out the part that committed the party to propagandize for it. It was similarly to the resolution of an earlier controversy (1906) around trade union leaders’ opposition to the general strike. A watered-down resolution of support for the possibility of a general strike in the future if the unions and union leaders agreed to it passed. Kautsky’s role in this debate was to act as a left critic of the trade union leaders, but even more sharply to criticize radicals like Luxemburg for impatience and thinking that they could conjure up revolution. The 1910 example functions in a couple of ways. First, it undermines the idea that revolutionaries didn’t care about democratic rights, since that was what the whole argument between Luxemburg and Kautsky revolved around.6 But from that root in a debate on strategy in Prussia, the Kautsky-Luxemburg grew into a polemic about reform and revolution. As Charles Post pointed out, History would prove Luxemburg and her comrades correct on the suffrage issue. The SPD leadership, with the active support of Kautsky — the spokesperson of the emerging “orthodox Marxist center” — derailed the militant movement for suffrage reform in Prussia. The “three class” voting system remained in place until 1919, when massive strikes and mutinies and the threat of workers’ revolution finally produced universal suffrage in Germany.7 Second, it shows that this incident which led Luxemburg to break with Kautsky, and which could be considered the dividing line between the “good” and “bad” Kautsky, has antecedents that reach all the way back to the high water mark of the “good” Kautsky that Blanc wants to uphold. Recall that Kautsky viewed the “war of attrition” as being the synonymous with the practice of the SPD almost from its inception. Mike Taber’s critique of Blanc’s sloppiness and slippery use of words is highly effective. For example, he calls out Eric’s remarks about “dozens of occasions over the past century in which a majority of workers have supported a process of democratic socialist transformation” being more appropriate to the dozens of elections of labor and social democratic rather than the few instances of electoral victories leading to revolutionary crises. If Blanc can argue that the 1917 experience hasn’t been replicated, and therefore, should be discarded a model for socialist transformation in the 21st century, what can we say about those “dozens” of experiences of labor and social democratic governments? Though these parties have held power for years in a number of countries in Western Europe, Western Europe is no closer to socialism today than it was in 1917. It’s likewise with Eric’s constant invocations of the word “rupture” and related words (“ruptural”) without really giving them definitive content. In this way, Kautsky’s parliamentary road to socialism can be made to seem as “ruptural” as the 1918-1919 German revolution. And that is clearly what Blanc’s reference to the Finnish revolution of 1917 and 1918 is meant to do. Blanc is correct to assert that socialists today should study the lessons of the Finnish experience, which are not well-known. However, socialists today may not arrive at the same conclusions about the utility of the Finnish example that Blanc does. As Duncan Hart wrote in response to Blanc’s 2017 article on the Finnish revolution, “Far from the revolution being a vindication of the SDP’s strategy, the horrific massacre and political repression that followed is a searing indictment of the best form Social Democracy could take. If anything, the Finnish tragedy is precisely an argument for the Bolshevik’s interventionist revolutionary Marxism in the negative.”8 Most of the Blanc/Taber debate ends before the German party’s collapse into chauvinism in the First World War. Kautskyism increasingly proved itself unable to cope with unexpected events and crises, and a speeding up of politics. When more was demanded of the party than simply a better election platform, it was found wanting. The passive optimism of Kautsky’s most radical period foreshadowed this. In 1909, the party thought his “road to power” to be too radical to publish under the party’s name. As Salvadori points out, there’s a disjunction between Kautsky’s discussing the period as one of domestic reaction and rising imperialism, while asserting that the coming social confrontation would occur in conditions favorable to the working class. Is Kautskyism relevant today? To answer this question we have to define what we mean by “today.” If we define “today” subjectively by the state of the revolutionary left and its organizations, we might understand why Kautsky’s politics have some attraction. It’s that, if we view the current weak state of the revolutionary left and the forces of socialism as something akin to 1848 or that of the period of reaction after the defeat of the Paris Commune, it might make sense. With little organization, and thus, with little organizational expression of the sorting out of perspectives between reform and revolution, Kautsky’s politics can seem like they fit with the moment. If we’re nearly back to the formation of the modern socialist movement, or (more positively), if we’re refounding socialism for the 21st century, than perhaps it makes sense that we can borrow from one of its earliest exponents. For some this just covers for a fairly open advocacy of reformism, but with a Marxist gloss to give it an edgier, more radical, feel. This is where I would place the political current that Catalyst/Vivek Chibber, Jacobin and Eric Blanc inhabit. Despite the rhetoric, their advocacy and practice is against the possibility of revolution today, and to put forth an “anti-rupture” theory of social change, very much in line with Kautsky’s. It’s also ironic that those who consider Leninism to be old-fashioned or out of touch with 21st century reality reach back to rehabilitate an even older tradition whose heyday was forged in the 19th century. However, I think there’s another, more revolutionary or anti-capitalist view that, if it doesn’t necessarily hold up Kautsky as its inspiration, does actually show appreciation for the Second International socialist parties, and even for the large Stalinized CPs of the 20th century, like the Eurocommunist Italian Communist Party. I was reminded of an article by Martin Mosquera, an Argentinian Trotskyist, about revolutionary organization today. It was published in the 1917 centennial issue of Viento Sur. The article discusses the importance of these parties in building a working-class culture and, in the case of the Second International parties, of producing the generation of leaders that formed the 3rd International. For sections of today’s Fourth International, this provides some historical justification for their work in the broad parties, such as Podemos or the Brazilian Workers Party. Mosquera emphasizes the need for revolutionaries to maintain within a broad formation an anti-capitalist current/organization that’s tied to the social movements. This is one way to avoid adaptation to social democracy. But if revolutionaries do not have a solid organizational foundation to work with, it is easy to see how their theory and practice can adapt to the social democratic (or Eurocommunist or populist) broader formation. These types of strategic questions are going to face the revolutionary left for years to come, and hopefully will become more “live” questions as the struggle picks up. So on this score, to answer the question about Kautsky’s relevance, we can say that he and his legacy are relevant to other socialists in the orbit of social democracy. And, by extension, it is relevant to revolutionaries and Leninists who must polemicize with these politics. However, if we define “today” in more objective terms, with increasing immiseration of millions of workers, with social revolt sweeping the globe, with political crises like the impeachment of trump, with the far right growing, and with climate catastrophe facing us, it’s hard to see how Kautsky’s politics (the ones that Blanc admires) are relevant. Remember, Kautsky’s politics were the reflection of, as Trotsky put it, “an era of capitalist ascension, of democracy, of adaptation of the proletariat. The revolutionary side of Marxism had changed into an indefinite, in any case, a distant perspective. The struggle for reforms and propaganda was on the order of the day.” Does that description really accord with the picture of the world today? Hardly. Obviously, that doesn’t mean that people automatically gravitate to revolutionary politics, but nothing in politics is automatic. And what answer to the current state of affairs of the world do the modern-day Kautskyists have beyond electing a Corbyn or a Sanders? And could it be that the revival of Kautsky’s ideas is only temporary before the set of crises listed above exposes all of their weaknesses? For that we can only prepare. 1 There is some disagreement as to whether Lenin and the Bolsheviks described their project as building a party of a new type, and there is plenty of evidence that the term originated with Stalinism instead. In any event, Lenin used the phrase only once, in a letter to Alexandra Kollontai in April, 1917: “P.S. I am afraid that there will now be an epidemic in Petersburg ‘simply’ of excitement, without systematic work on a party of a new type. It must not be a la ‘Second International.’ Wider! Raise up new elements! Awaken a new initiative, new organizations in all sections, and prove to them that peace will be brought only by an armed Soviet of Workers’ Deputies, if it takes power.” In these lines, Lenin clearly envisions an activist party, organizing new forces, to rally on behalf of the workers’ councils, rather than parliament. 2 Massimo Salvadori, Karl Kautsky and the Socialist Revolution 1880-1938 (Verso Modern Classics) (pp. 13-14). Verso Books. Kindle Edition. 3 Ibid., 121. 4 It’s also possible that Taber considered the Prussian voting rights struggle to be an example of one of the points against the “bad” Kautsky. 5 Salvadori, p. 145. 6 In another context, Lenin wrote: “The proletariat cannot be victorious except through democracy, i.e., by giving full effect to democracy and by linking with each step of its struggle democratic demands formulated in the most resolute terms. . . . We must combine the revolutionary struggle against capitalism with a revolutionary program and tactics on all democratic demands: a republic, a militia, the popular election of officials, equal rights for women, the self-determination of nations, etc. While capitalism exists, these demands—all of them—can only be accomplished as an exception, and even then in an incomplete and distorted form.” V.I. Lenin, The Revolutionary Proletariat and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination at https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1915/oct/16.htm. 7 Charles Post, “The ‘Best’ of Karl Kautsky Isn’t Good Enough,” Jacobin, March 9, 2019, at https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/03/karl-kautsky-socialist-strategy-german-revolution. 8 See the exchange between Hart and Blanc on Finland here and here. Hart points out that Blanc’s promotion of socialist leader Otto Kuusinen as an example of a Kautskyan who led a revolution, ignored that Kuusinen subsequently repudiated his role in the failed revolution and went on to become a founder of the Finnish Communist Party.

A decimated giant kelp forest in Southern California is making a comeback after volunteers removed almost two million sea urchins that devour the plants. The Bay Foundation reports that the…

10 John Muir quotes to inspire you to take a Muir Woods tour. These quotes will make anyone want to take a trip to see the beautiful redwoods.

"This is not just about a Green New Deal, this is about a New Deal for the United States of America," says Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

By Paul Mattick Sr., Capitalism and Ecology, 1976 (posted on Libcom.org, January 25, 2018) 'Kapitalismus und Okologie' (1976) by Paul Mattick, translated by Paul Mattick Jr. This article looks at the ecological crisis, the Club of Rome's 'The Limits to Growth', and the work of East German philosopher Wolfgang Harich. The historical character of nature follows from the Second Law of thermodynamics, discovered more than a hundred years ago by Carnot and Clausius, spelling an increase in entropy ending in heat death. Our earthly life depends on the continuous supply of energy from solar radiation, which decreases with increasing entropy, however slowly. The period of time involved is indefinite from the human point of view, too gigantic to be taken into practical consideration. Nevertheless, the entropy law has a continuous, direct influence on the earth and therefore on the fate of humankind. Apart from the sun, the mineral wealth of the earth provides for the satisfaction of human energy needs. Its exploitation, however, hastens the transformation of “free” into “bound” energy, that is, energy no longer available for human use and degrading towards heat death. In other words, the available energy sources can only be utilized once. With their exhaustion human life would come to an end, and indeed very long before the cooling of the sun, as all the natural riches of the earth contain no more energy than two days’ sunlight. For humanity, therefore, the Second Law of thermodynamics comes down to the limitation of natural wealth. The more slowly it is extracted, the longer humanity can live; the faster it is utilized, the sooner we will reach our end. Since consumption varies with the size of the population, the moment at which the world will collapse is connected with the population problem. In order to delay this collapse, population growth must be limited and the consumption of natural resources be decreased. To this problem, raised with regard to the capitalist world by the Club of Rome, Wolfgang Harich has turned with regard to communism, which has up to now similarly been engaged in endless economic growth.1 The old saying fits Harich: “The cat won’t leave the mouse alone.” His many years in Walter Ulbricht’s prisons have not been able to break his spirit of opposition. As after June 17, 1953, he turned against the Stalinist course in the DDR, in the interest of the DDR itself, so today he turns against the growth ideology reigning in that country, to save the world by means of communism. After 1953 the DDR should have come closer to the West in order to master its inner contradictions; today the ecological problems raised in the West should be tackled by the East, in order to prevent the destruction of the world. The abolition of capitalism is thus for Harich not only the goal of communist politics but the only adequate means to move to a world without growth, on which depends the long-term survival of the human race. He expressed his views in interviews with Freimut Duve, with the hope that they would not again be misunderstood in the DDR. Neither Marx nor classical economics related their theories to the entropy law. Malthus, however, opened up the population problem for debate and Ricardo saw the tendency to declining returns from the land as a limit to capitalist development. In this way they apologetically portrayed specifically capitalist contradictions as natural and unalterable processes. These theories were developed at a time when agriculture still dominated the economy and industrial development was making its initial take-off. Although production is determined by nature and human beings, Marx’s and Engels’s chief attention was directed not to natural limitations but to those due to the capitalist mode of production, since the world—seen as nature—was still quite under-populated, and the “overpopulation” of which Malthus wrote was a direct result of capitalism. Of course, an increasing population presupposes the increasing productivity of labor, and this, in turn, presupposes changes in social structure. “The more I go into the stuff,” Marx wrote Engels, “the more I become convinced that the reform of agriculture, and hence the question of property based on it, is the alpha and omega of the coming upheaval. Without that, Father Malthus will turn out to be right.”2 In the light of the dominance in the DDR of the ideology of growth, which is supposed to take the development of the productive forces beyond any reached so far, Harich seeks to legitimate his interest in ecology with references to Marx and Engels and to dialectical materialism. Citing the French Communist G. Biolat, he maintains that “the development of ecology expressed a new deeply dialectical approach to the study of nature,” so that his own concern “is as orthodox as one could wish.” Ecology concerns itself with the “reciprocal action between nature and society,” which can only be fully comprehended by the adepts of “the dialectics of nature” and the “Marxist theory of knowledge refined by Lenin.” Now, the metabolism between humans and nature, which can also be understood as a mutual interaction, has in itself nothing to do with the question of the dialectics of nature, and will not be disputed by those for whom the dialectic has no validity. Therefore Lenin’s epistemology is also not required in order to discuss ecology and the threats to it, just as his possession of this epistemology, as Harich must to his sorrow recognize, has until now contributed little to the knowledge of ecological problems. In any case, the Club of Rome is unconcerned with dialectical materialism. As in the last analysis it hardly matters even for Harich whether the dialectics of nature already included the ecological problem, it is not necessary to discuss his party-line Leninist orthodoxy. His argument rests not on the dialectics of nature but on the calculations of the Club of Rome, which start from the too rapid consumption of natural resources and the population explosion to predict a decline of humanity in the not too distant future. There are aspects of nature which can be grasped with formal logic and others which require the use of dialectical logic. Discoveries in microphysics enforce a logic adequate to this object, which is not identical with either formal or dialectical logic. But the means for the understanding of nature and the relevance of its regularities on the human beings who investigate them give no information about the “totality” of nature and its laws of motion, which are closed to us up to now, and no doubt permanently. Even if dialectical logic would be required for the study of nature, we could draw no conclusions from this about the dialectics of nature; in contrast, the dialectic of society is visible in its economic development and class struggles. One can, of course, describe the entropy law as “dialectical,” just because it implies lasting qualitative changes, especially if one traces all economic and biological processes to their physical basis. But the Second Law of thermodynamics was discovered by physical chemistry, not by the dialectical method, and is quite sufficient to illuminate ecology from both a biological and a social point of view. Marxism is not a natural science, and in fact not a science in the bourgeois sense, but uses scientific methods in order to discover the presuppositions and necessities of social transformation in general and of the abolition of capitalism in particular, in order to intervene practically in social processes. Laws of nature cannot be changed; they have to be accepted, although increasing understanding of them becomes a human force of production, determining the possibilities of social development. If nature as it affects human beings can thus only develop in one direction, namely its end, so long as the world exists the problems of humanity are determined by this world and must be decided within it. Even if it were true that thermodynamics is only a characteristic of an expanding universe and that in a contracting universe the opposite process would occur, leading to a new production of matter out of radiation, this has no significance for the world which would have disappeared in the mean time, together with its inhabitants. It is also obvious without reference to the entropy principle that the metabolism between humanity and nature depends on the fruitfulness of the earth and the productiveness of its raw materials. With the exhaustion of the latter the sources of energy decline and with them the possibility of human interventions in natural processes. The world in which Marx and Engels lived knew, however, none of the nature-determined limits to production. Neither physical nor biological processes explained the unpleasant social conditions. The exhaustion of the earth’s wealth and relative overpopulation were the direct result of production for profit and could be undone by the elimination of the capitalist relations of production. One could not yet speak of an ecological crisis, in particular not from a Marxist standpoint. Are things different today? According to the Club of Rome and Harich, we are in the midst of an ecological crisis, which obliges Marxism also to go more deeply than before into the natural basis of society and into the population question raised by Malthus. Harich believes that communist scientists, if not yet in the DDR then in the USSR, “are beginning to focus with growing insight on the ecological crisis.” To repeat: the problem can be summed up in three ideas—environmental overload, consumption of raw materials, overpopulation. The solution, according to Harich, lies in reversing these processes. This, however, implies the destruction of capitalist society and therefore revolutionary transformations on the global level. According to Harich, however, we can today no longer speak of the communist revolution as it was once imagined, freeing the social forces of production from the fetters of the capitalist relations of production in order to meet growing needs, but must take up Babeuf’s idea of turning back the productive forces and human needs in the direction of the pre-industrial ascetic collectivity. Marx had already emphasized that in capitalism the productive forces had become forces of destruction, “and exactly this,” says Harich, “ we are experiencing today.” But this is a misunderstanding on Harich’s part. Even considering the destructive side of capitalist development, Marx saw in communism the only possible way to a further progressive development of the productive forces, on which the overcoming of human poverty as determined by capitalism, as in general, depends. Certainly this growth of the social forces of production includes the requirement that it should no longer serve the blind drive for valorization of capital, but rational human needs, which are themselves determined by the technologico-scientific character of the additional productive forces. Now this may turn out to be utopian, not only because of the long-lived character of capitalism but also because of limits to economic growth set by nature and not considered by Marx. The relative overpopulation Marx wrote about has, according to Harich, become absolute overpopulation, which cannot be overcome by means of a change from capitalism to communism, but only through its systematic reduction by means of population planning—and not only in the “Third World” but on the global scale. Thus even communism allows for no further development on the basis of modern industry, but requires economic planning without growth and possibly the liquidation of forms of production already in use. The ecological crisis discovered by the Club of Rome and others can be seen as a new attempt—similar to the efforts of Malthus and Ricardo—to explain social difficulties as the result of natural conditions, since to them the form of society appears to be natural and unchangeable. The novel element is that today there is agreement from the “Marxist” side, with either a good or a bad conscience. Of course, Harich’s position differs from that of the Club of Rome in that he remains aware that even with a full understanding of the crisis situation the capitalist world is in no position to take measures to preserve human life for the distant future, even if on a more modest basis. The Club of Rome, Harich notes, indeed speaks of an expectable impoverishment and destruction of the world, but “it does not say that the rich must disappear from the picture.” People are indeed ready today “to ration gasoline,” but not prepared “to ration everything.” But why shouldn’t everything be rationed, and indeed on a socialist basis, asks Harich; “Wouldn’t that already be communism?” Would it not be, “as a result of a rational distribution, Babeuf’s communism, to which the workers’ movement must now, having reached a higher level, turn back with a dialectical spiral movement—the negation of the negation—after the ‘springs’ of capitalist wealth have flowed for nearly 200 years?” But why stop with Babeuf? Why not return to the perfect ecology of Paradise before Original Sin? The one is as much an impossibility as the other, on which Babeuf must come to grief. History cannot be made to go backwards, not even through the “negation of the negation.” A rationed distribution itself presupposes productive forces which are a match for the needs of four billion people, and with this continued productive development, in order to counter the law of increasing entropy, i.e. to support the negative entropy of the living world with the least expenditure of “free” energy. But apart from this, the rationing of which Harich speaks is not at all foreign to the capitalist world, where it is to be found, applied more or less thoroughly, in wartime (and also in “war-communism”). Besides, capitalism is based, in the form of the law of surplus value, on a form of “rationing” of proletarian living conditions, something that also characterizes the relations of production in the putatively “socialist” countries, although there surplus value can appear directly as surplus product. In fact, the existence of capital, as Harich himself explains, hangs on the continuing “rationing” of the producers, in order to satisfy the growing surplus-value requirements of accumulation. When and to whatever extent it is necessary, capital will also seek political ways to push the living conditions of the workers down to a more modest level. The expanding poverty on the global level is a product of surplus value production, the result of capitalism’s “rationing” of the conditions of life of ever greater masses of people, and can therefore not be recommended as a solution to the ecological crisis. If it were a solution, capital would be in the best position to carry it through. When Harich speaks of the necessity to reduce production and consumption, the question arises: of whom is he speaking, actually? The workers, from whom always more surplus value is being extracted? The unemployed, who can hardly keep their heads above water? The hundreds of millions in the underdeveloped countries, who suffer from malnourishment and slow (or often fast) starvation? And if absolute overpopulation and the too rapid consumption of raw materials are the causes of these sufferings, then a more just distribution cannot change much essentially. Thus, according to Harich, we must call an end to accumulation, so that social production on the basis of simple reproduction, and with zero population growth, can finally match consumption. The capitalist relations of production and property exclude the possibility of simple reproduction. Interruption of the industrial development demanded by the pressure to accumulate brings economic crisis and the misery of a depression. From the point of view that sees the ecological crisis as already underway, this would of course be a welcome situation. But as a crisis situation without a revolutionary contestation of the capitalist system can lead only to a new phase of accumulation, a realization of simple reproduction is reserved for communism. Indeed, in Harich’s conception communism also not a reality, but its preconditions have already been established with the existence of “socialist countries.” It depends on them, and on the workers’ movements in the capitalist countries, whether society can preserve its natural basis. “The overthrow of the bourgeoisie, the creation of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the realization of communism are,” according to Harich, “the presuppositions for the social realization of the demands of the Club of Rome.” Apart from a handful of scientists, however, neither the authorities of the “socialist countries” nor the workers of the capitalist world are conscious of this important task. As Freimut Duve emphasizes, “the economic policies of all nations—without exception—are the same as if the studies of the Club of Rome had never been made.” This holds also for the “socialist countries,” which does not stop Harich from ascribing to them he possibility of a faster and better adaptation to the ecological crisis, as they are not subject to the pressure for expanded reproduction. Since in any case the destruction of the environment is a problem for industrial society generally, the possibility of coming to grips with this problem is in no way system-neutral. Certainly, unfortunately, the raw-materials resources of the “socialist” countries make a prior communist revolution unnecessary. But they will nevertheless finally deal with the ecological crisis, as communists “will never resign themselves to the idea that humanity is doomed to destruction.” In the meantime, it is a matter of once more swimming “against the current” and holding an image of the future to the eyes of the world, so as to indicate the pathway to escape. That the Club of Rome can only warn and make proposals, according to Harich, changes nothing in the “revolutionary explosive force” of the ecological understanding it has achieved. The implications of this understanding can only be drawn by the workers’ movement and the workers’ states, but they demand the revision of traditional communist ideas. “The advantages of the socialist system must be utilized, in order to regulate by planning the production of all material goods, to do optimal justice to the criteria of ecology...” To this end, says Harich, “the left-wing parties must now immediately begin to explain to the working class the reasons why which it will halt economic growth as soon as it has come to power, and impose material restrictions on the whole population, including the workers.” This will thus be a revolution not for improving but for lowering of the workers’ standard of living. It will be difficult to arouse much revolutionary enthusiasm for this project. This is Harich’s greatest worry. As a truth-loving person he wishes to awaken no illusions and make clear to the workers the necessity of new privations, “as popular as possible and as unpopular as is necessary given the judgment of science. ” In any case we must put as much of an end as we can to prosperity thinking and the fetishism of growth, “by means of re-education, though also, when necessary, by rigorous repression, perhaps by the shutdown of whole branches of production, accompanied by legally imposed cold-turkey cures.” It is clear, at least for Harich, “that for this the social ownership of the means of production, administered by the proletarian state, is the necessary precondition.” But this is not enough. The proletarian state must also have the power to control individual consumption according to criteria imposed by ecology. “In the finite system of the biosphere,” Harich continues, “in which communism must make its way, it must transform human society into a homeostatic stationary state which, just as it limits the continuation of the dynamic of capitalism or of socialism, also has no place for the limitless freedom of the individual. Any idea of a future withering away of the state is therefore illusory.” This “revision” of “classical Marxism-Leninism” is directed of course only against the ideology and not against the reality of the “socialist” countries, which have never, and do not now, intend to renounce “state authority and codified law” in order to realize communism in the original Marxian sense. But just as the authoritarian state, according to Harich, was necessary in order to create the “heavy industrial foundation of national self-determination” with “unexampled harshness and brutality,” it is even more necessary today in order to dismantle this foundation. As Stalin “governed the country” with the goal of industrial development, so must the proletarian state, taking into its calculations the forecasts of science, utilize all necessary means to force people into a life in accordance with ecology. Babeuf’s communism itself cannot be left to the workers, but can only be achieved through the unavoidable state power exercised by Marxist-Leninist parties. To this Duve objects that one cannot speak of communism in relation to Harich’s authoritarian ideas, since “the administration of want in any case will give the administrators the real power.” The perpetuation of the state is naturally the perpetuation of class society and so of exploitative relations of production, which are at the same time relations of property. As state property the means of production appear in future as means of production separated from the workers. How and what is produced is subordinated not to their control but to that of state institutions, which supposedly represent the interest of society. But this society remains divided into one group of people organized through the state, who control the means of production and so the distribution of the product, and the mass of the population, who must follow their orders. This new type of society characterized by state control of the means of production appears to the bourgeoisie as state socialism, or simply socialism, but is capitalist in its relation to the workers, something which is conveniently expressed in the concept of state capitalism, although it seeks to present itself as socialism. Once this situation is established, the social reproduction process takes place as the reproduction of state domination and social wealth grows as the increase of state power. Apart from the international competitive struggle among nationally-organized capitals, which will be even sharper thanks to the differences between the capitalist systems, the privileged class building itself up within the social relations of state capitalism has its own direct interest in the increase of the surplus product at its disposal and so for the development of the productive forces on a state-capitalist foundation. It cannot be expected freely to set limits on the productive forces, and to the extent to which it is forced in this direction it will not apply the resulting privations it to itself, but impose them on the powerless mass of the population. The ecological argument, of course, offers a good alibi. It is already of use to Harich for the defense of the continuing backwardness of the “socialist” countries in comparison to the capitalist industrial nations. “We must transform the West-East gradient of living standards,” he says, “which up to the present has limited the progress of the proletarian revolution in the industrial capitalist countries, into an East-West gradient of exemplary care for the environment, of rational, moderate, economical handling of raw materials and a quality of socialist life in accordance with it.” Workers in the West, even if only after a successful revolution, are to take the lower standard of living of the East as a model and perceive their revolutionary duty in the renunciation of the few comforts which capitalism occasionally offers them. What the workers of the DDR experience should thus make clear to those in the West “that the characteristics of the DDR, as of the socialist camp in general, which we usually see as disadvantages, are advantages as soon as we measure them against the new standards of the ecological crisis.” This inversion of hitherto existing values can, however, in Harich’s conception not be achieved overnight. Babeuf’s communism of equals presupposes a “first socialist phase,” as Marx already stressed and as exists in the DDR: i.e. a distribution not according to need but according to work performed. As it is the “proletarian state” that judges performance, this state becomes the instrument of inequality and has no other content than this inequality, or itself. But just as little as the ruling class in private capitalism is willing freely to give up its privileges, so little will the new class ruling through the “proletarian state” give up the privileges associated with it. The “socialist state” is no more able to respond to the warnings of the Club of Rome à la Babeuf than capital; it acts instead at the expense of the workers, as always, with or without the ecological crisis. And as little as the working class will be ready, under the conditions of exploitation and inequality that obtain in the capitalist countries, to set aside its needs to preserve the environment, so little will the workers of the “socialist” countries renounce an improvement of their living standard in the interest of “future generations.” The class struggle, always latent, will decide the further course of economic development. If economic growth is to be halted the class struggle must also be abolished, or, to use Harich’s terminology, the “dictatorship of the proletariat” under the leadership of the communist parties must be created on a global scale in order to meet the demands of the ecological crisis even in the “first phase” of communism. The class struggle cannot of course be abolished by means of state power but only carried on in a one-sided way for a longer or shorter period, that is, through the fascist or democratic dictatorship of capital or through the “dictatorship of the working class” in the sense of “Marxism-Leninism.” Just as the economic crisis arising from the capitalist relations of production sharpens class antagonisms, so must the measures for overcoming the ecological crisis, which are the same as those responding to an economic crisis, be expected to sharpen class conflicts. The continuing threat to the ruling classes will, on the one hand, push the latter to keep their power by dictatorial means; on the other, they will also seek to meet the demands of the workers halfway, in so far as this is possible. For private capital this can only be a matter of measures that lead to the resumption of capital accumulation and with it the expansion of production. To keep their power, the ruling classes of the “socialist” countries must increase the productivity of labor and expand production, committing themselves without a backward glance to the ecological consequences of further growth. Thus the warnings of the Club of Rome fall on deaf ears everywhere, and particularly in the “socialist” countries, where a new “bourgeoisie” has come into existence on the foundation of the state. Harich conjures up a lack in understanding on the part of the “communist” authorities, which could be remedied by “scientific” insight, but the real problem is the class consciousness of a new ruling class, as strong as that of the old ruling class. It is the falsification of socialism in state socialism, the only kind of “socialism” that Harich can imagine, which allows him to make his ecological hopes depend on state dictatorship and its perpetuation. If the salvation of the world depends on the already existing “socialist” countries and future ones like them, we can abandon all hope. What Harich reproaches capitalism for, its inability to call a halt to economic growth, is as true for the state-capitalist systems posing as “socialism.” His illusionary demand for “a stationary state of humanity within the system of nature” requires the simultaneous overcoming of the capitalist and state-capitalist systems and would require revolutionary movements which would not subordinate themselves unconditionally to the “judgment of science” or the state but would, without obedience to authority, make themselves at home in the world in a way corresponding to their own necessities and needs. As such movements do not exist, we are stuck with the ecological crisis. “Science” is not responsible for the practical application or failure to apply the knowledge won by it; these are left to the governments and so to the ruling classes. It is peculiar that Harich criticizes the fetishism of growth in the name of science, since the latter is itself only an aspect of the fetishism of growth. Science is represented by people, who are not only scientists but also members of society, and it is particular social interests that determine the fields of application of science. The development of the capitalist forces of production or--what comes to the same thing--the generation of the “ecological crisis” was a process made possible by science, to an increasing extent a direct result of science and its influence on technology. It is from this environment-destroying science that Harich now expects the necessary instructions for the reconstruction of an ecological equilibrium, whose practical realization would set definite limits not only to the growth of the economy but to that of science. He speaks of course of science under the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” but since this is only another name for the still existing capital-worker relation, in the form of state property, here also the development of science depends on the further growth of the productive forces, as the socially-determined interests of the scientists remain tied to the progress of state-capitalism. This is apparently contradicted by the recognition given to the Club of Rome by Russian scientists, as well as by the attention given generally to the Club’s discoveries, credited with “revolutionary explosive force.” It seems astonishing that these researches have been financed by capitalist institutions and business concerns, such as the Volkswagen Foundation, to say nothing of the unexpected liberalism with which totalitarian states have allowed their academics the right to pessimistic futurology. Do we here see science as such, independent of its social environment, opening up a free path, or are its present-day concerns also those of the ruling classes? Is this development perhaps a part of called-for long-term planning, or only a spontaneous reaction to a shortage of necessary raw materials and fuels, politically engineered in the framework of the price mechanism? Or are we here dealing with no more than a free rein given to science, which can ultimately lead only to extensive projects to give the scientists jobs and incomes? Although the ecological problem actually exists, the researches into it have almost no practical meaning. In so far as one could ascribe practical significance to them, it is a contradictory one: while they are able to explain the dreadful situation to the workers in the East and West and halt their struggle for better living conditions, an increase in surplus value or surplus product still requires progressive ecological destruction. The absolute maintenance of an ecological balance is impossible. But today the prolongation of human existence by respecting the limits set by nature is a possibility, but one whose realization would require the end of the capitalist overexploitation of natural resources. The limits set by nature are in any case not yet the most important. What is necessary, today and tomorrow, is to end the human misery due to the capitalist relations of production, as the starting-point for a rationally planned mode of society in accordance with natural conditions—one based not on further privations but on a higher standard of living for everyone, on which the diminution of population growth depends, and which would make possible the further development of society’s productive forces. The progressive destruction of the environment is not so much the result of growing productive forces as of the development of these forces under capitalist conditions. Were capitalist production really what it is claimed to be, production for the satisfaction of human needs, the development of the productive forces would have had a character different from the actual one, with a different technology and different ecological consequences. With respect to this, enlarged reproduction with a growing population and increasing needs makes no difference in principle. But the development of the productive forces takes place on the basis of capitalist production relations and is thus bound to the production of capital; it can serve human needs only insofar as they coincide with the requirements of capitalist accumulation. This rules out any direct reference to true social needs and to the natural limits of social production. Under the conditions of capitalist competition, which are not abolished by monopoly capital, and to which the state-capitalist systems are subordinated as parts of a global system, the development of the productive forces advances blindly, especially as attempts are made to bring production under conscious central control on the national level. This process requires an enormous wastage of human labor power and natural resources, which would not occur (at least to the same degree) in another social system. Although there is not much sense in it, one could calculate to what extent the expansion of capitalist production is determined by the requirements of human existence and to what extent by the specific character of the capitalist mode of production. In other words: what would production look like without all the productive and unproductive activities required by capitalism? Surely such a calculation would show that at least half of capitalist production could be dispensed with without affecting people’s living conditions. The larger portion of labor performed today is unproductive, making “sense” only within the capitalist market and property relations. It could be transformed into productive labor—“productive” not in the sense of profitable but in the sense of creative of use-value--while shortening labor time. Such production, with the disappearance of the profit principle, competition, and the unnecessary “moral depreciation” of the means of production, would bring a meaningful savings of raw materials without diminishing production to meet human needs. Such a transformation requires a social order different from the existing ones. If we follow the calculations of the Club of Rome, it may be that--given overpopulation, the limited carrying capacity of the earth, and the drying up of sources of energy--the opportunity to make it may already have been lost. A glance at today’s world production shows clearly that we cannot yet speak of an actual lack of material resources. To the contrary, and despite the short, artificially produced “energy crisis,” the world is suffering from “overproduction,” from an insufficient effective demand, even on the basis of a low rate of accumulation, which by itself sets limits to the expansion of production. The crisis situation we are experiencing has as yet no natural causes, but has its basis in the valorization requirements of capital. Even according to the Club of Rome, the effects of the ecological crisis will be fully visible, and take on catastrophic forms, only in “two or three generations,” and then only if no steps are taken to counter it. In the two reports produced for the Club of Rome that Harich cites3 a reprieve for the world seems possible by the midst of the next century. In the meantime a way must be found to move from today’s “undifferentiated” growth to an “organic” growth of economy and society. This way is to be discovered thanks to a computer model that extrapolates the trend of present-day development into the future. Admittedly, the results are only a matter of probability, not of certainty. While the first report on the “limits to growth” concerned the world as a whole, dealing with the increase of the total population and the average per capita income, etc., the second report emphasizes that this sort of analysis cannot lead to a solution of the problem. The world consists of various, very different parts, which must be dealt with in particular ways, with regard for regional necessities. If the first report warned that the world system will break down in the middle of the next century, the second report predicts not the breakdown of the world but that of one or another of its regions (which would, of course, ipso facto mean the destruction of the world as a totality). Whether fragment by fragment or all at once, the breakdown is inevitable, according to the computer’s logic; it follows that it is up to “statesmen” to pull the carts out of the muck. Here we encounter the mentality of the Club of Rome’s scientific experts, for example, M. Mesarovic and E. Pestel, responsible for the second report. They refer throughout not to capitalist society, but to “society” (or simply to “humanity”), threatened by nature. From their point of view the ecological crisis has its roots in activities that “arise from people’s best intentions.” That these intentions involve the exploitation of the workers does not occur to them; to the contrary, they are convinced “that the decrease of human labor through the exploitation of non-human sources of energy is a project with which every person must agree.” They are unable to grasp that it is exactly the increase in the exploitation of human labor that makes necessary the over-exploitation of natural resources. They have either no understanding of the society in which they live or they feign a lack of understanding in order not to be offensive. But looking at their proposed solutions, it is the first of these that seems correct. These proposals amount to a series of noncommittal forms of talk, such as emphasizing the necessity of a global solution of the ecological problem; a more balanced world economy through the simultaneous abolition of under- and over-development in the respective regions; an appropriate worldwide allocation of non-renewable raw materials and fuels; an effective population policy; a turn towards solar energy instead of more nuclear reactors; increased support for the poor countries by the rich ones; and similar praiseworthy measures. Not a word is wasted on how this program is to be put into practice. The experts are certain only that the solution of the problématique humainerequires the closest cooperative work on the world scale, since there can only be a future “when history no longer, as earlier, is determined by individuals or social classes, but through the devotion of material resources to the security of human existence.” The recognition of capitalist reality is on the same level as Harich’s understanding of the “socialist” world. In both cases we have to do only with conjurations spoken into the wind. Somehow the authors of the second report do not themselves feel quite right. As “rational” as the computer is, people are irrational. Although the computer indicates that people can be helped not through conflict but through cooperation, the computer analysis necessarily deals only with the material limits of growth. But the world is threatened by people themselves on the basis of social, political, and organizational problems, which in the last analysis spring from “human nature.” Since the Club of Rome is non-partisan with respect to politics, the problems can’t be discussed politically. The report notes that the quickest road to the annihilation of humankind would certainly be an atomic war; but this eventuality, like the enormous wastage of expensive resources through armaments and militarism, is not included in the framework of the problems discussed by the Club of Rome, since the world is exposed to the danger of complete destruction even without an atomic war. A dialectician like Harich can not be satisfied with this. The distinction made by the Club of Rome between natural and social problems contradicts the “interaction” between humanity and nature. For Harich the threatened atomic war and the ecological crisis stand in a close connection. Indeed, he does not deny that there are social contradictions that drive towards war, but “in a time in which economic growth comes up against unbreachable natural limits, we must also readjust our views a little. Under the conditions of the ecological crisis natural and social factors are intertwined in previously unknown ways ... The influence of society on nature can create a situation which then in turn drives society to seek refuge in a catastrophe.” It is therefore not enough to strive directly to prevent war; we must treat the ecological crisis as a possible cause of war, in order to avoid war itself. Indeed, we had two world wars and many smaller skirmishes behind us before the threat to the ecology entered our consciousness. These wars happened not because nations fought like dogs with a bone over declining supplies of raw materials but because the capitalist competitive struggle over the surplus value extracted from the laboring population played out on a worldwide field. The competitive struggle exists under all circumstances, with or without shortages of raw materials, and thus has nothing to do with the latter but arises from the capitalist mode of production. Even when a shortage of raw materials and consumption goods leads to war instead of some other solution, this results from the form of society and not from the shortage as such. On this question, however, Harich again comes close to the Club of Rome’s one-sided conception of the problem as purely ecological, with no reference to the actual capitalist world. This world is for him too, despite the “intertwining of natural and social factors,” only a subordinate factor: it is the ecological crisis which can lead to war, so that avoiding war presupposes solving the ecological crisis. But war can break out tomorrow, while the ecological crisis is not expected till the middle of the next century. It can even be forestalled by an atomic war, which would provide a ghastly demonstration of humanity’s destruction not by nature but by capitalism. But is there actually an ecological crisis? The numbers produced by the computer model to which Harich and the Club of Rome refer are open to doubt from many different points of view. As the amount of raw materials and energy consumed by the industrial countries over the last 50 years can only be determined very inexactly, we are even less sure what is still available. Here we are dealing with unknown quantities, as can already be seen in the fact that estimates are continuously revised, not only because of the discovery of new reserves, but also because of improvements in methods of estimation. To give only one example: The untouched coal supplies in the United States were estimated in 1969 at 3,000 billion tons; in 1975 this quantity was increased by 23 percent on the basis of better methods of estimation. Since such mistakes of estimation, whether too high or too low, do not alter the fact that the raw materials and fuels will in the end be utilized, it does not make much sense to counterpose optimistic expectations to the pessimistic ones. But as things are, it is to be expected that for the foreseeable future economic policy and therefore politics will not be determined by ecological considerations, but—as earlier—by capital’s immanent requirement of profit production. The historical limit of capital is, according to Marx, capital itself. The development of the social forces of production by way of capital accumulation not only requires nonrenewable raw materials and brings with it relative overpopulation, but also leads to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall in relation to the growing mass of capital. With this the limits to capitalist expansion come into view. Even without the limits set by nature capital must come to an end. It is therefore not oriented directly to nature but to the profit rate, dependent on surplus value, which, as capital accumulates, determines the relation between nature and society. Thus the “ecological” apprehensions of the Club of Rome often have a prosaic background, as was prominent, for example, in the so-called oil crisis of 1973. Here there was not a sudden lack of oil but politically motivated price increases, following the inflation general in the world, which shifted the supply-demand relation to the benefit of the oil producers. If it were left to the market, only a considerable decline in demand could affect the monopoly price, and only with difficulty (and over time). But the increase in oil production together with increasing prices will, according to the second report of the Club of Rome, lead not only to a more rapid exhaustion of energy supplies but to a transfer of wealth and economic power from the industrial countries to the oil-producing states. Iran has already achieved minority control of the German Krupp works. Within ten years the oil states, with an accumulated capital of 500 billion dollars, could take a large part of Western capital into their hands, thus shaking the world economy, inclusive of the underdeveloped countries, to the deepest level. Without going into these ungrounded and more than dubious speculations, it can be noted that the wishes of the Club of Rome for a “global solution of the energy problem” appears to derive more from an economic than from an ecological point of view. In any case, it is at the moment not an actual lack of natural resources that menaces the world but the competitive war for global profit carried on by every possible means. As the movement of the world is determined by profit, the capitalists concern themselves with the ecological problem only insofar as it affects profit. The capitalists have no interest in the destruction of the world; if it turns out that saving the world can be profitable, then the protection of the world will become another business--all the more because environmental destruction is itself an instrument of competition for shares of the total profit. This problem appears in the economic literature under the heading of “externality,” the distinction between private effects and the social concomitant symptoms of capitalist production. Social phenomena are also ecological phenomena, as when the emission of pollutants of all sorts, which enter into natural cycles, finally destroys the necessary global balance of oxygen. In this way the destruction of the environment, which is often taken to be faster and more dangerous than the rapid use of material resources, is bound up with the exhaustion of resources. Such widely known phenomena, which can both be ascribed to profit production and also curtail profit production, affect different capitals differently and thus themselves provoke attempts to limit the destruction within capitalism. It depends on the mass of surplus value whether these attempts can be successful, i.e. on the increasing exploitation of the workers or on their “modest standard of living.” On this point Harich’s proposals are at one with the measures recommended by capital, as expressed by the Club of Rome. It is not impossible that—with sufficient surplus value production—capital itself could be able to avoid the destruction of the environment, in its own interest, as long as the cost is paid by the working population. And as accumulation sets limits to surplus value, the ongoing destruction of the environment can be traced back to the limits of the capitalist mode of production. We are, that is, faced here with a social, not an ecological problem. But what about overpopulation? This is a problem in itself, which will not simply vanish even with an imaginable rational management of raw materials and the end of environmental destruction. The production of means of subsistence is declining in relation to the increasing population. Is the earth becoming less fertile? Or is it simply inadequate to support the growing population? Among other studies, one undertaken three years ago for the Club of Rome, under the leadership of H. Linnemann, showed that the global capacity for food production has grown sufficiently to support a doubling of the population.4 The decrease in agricultural production relative to the growing population has at present nothing to do with any limits set by nature, but originates in social relations that stand in the way of an extension of production. Moreover, the hunger existing in the world has nothing to do with the productivity of agriculture. Even a doubling of production could not eliminate it; indeed it would mostly likely increase it even more. The existence of sufficient foodstuffs is not enough to guarantee the satisfaction of human consumption needs. Commodities exist only for effective demand, and for those who need it without the capacity to pay overproduction can be even more dangerous than a crop failure caused by nature. That crop failures can also lead to hunger has, of course, nothing to do with incalculable nature, but with the social neglect of measures which, with the increase in agricultural production and the improvement of agricultural productivity, could accumulate sufficient reserves to be able to offset natural catastrophes. In the underdeveloped, largely agrarian world, as for example in South Asia, the problem is not so much the miserliness of nature as a social class system of institutions and power relationships that stands in the way of increasing production and productivity. Besides the increasingly unsustainable subsistence economy, it is landed property, the tenant-farming system, usurious loan capital, the plantation economy, and the parasitical state bureaucracy that hinder any progressive development by maintaining the existing social structure. In the African states the specialization in the production of industrial raw materials created by the colonial system has led to a situation whose further development is today also subordinated to the capitalist crisis cycle and the impoverishment bound up with it. Not only there, but also in the South American nations, increasing industrialization comes at the cost of agricultural production. Former exporting countries are becoming importers of foodstuffs. Russia’s development into a competitive world power too has required the relative neglect of agriculture, making the importation of food necessary whenever there is a bad harvest. The increasing discrepancy between industrial and agricultural production has less to do with population growth and decreasing fertility of the soil that with the one-sided over-emphasis on industrial expansion, or capital’s expansion, demanded by capitalist competition. Of course, the population has grown enormously. Since medicine has lowered mortality figures considerably, the number of births, remaining the same, appears as a “population explosion.” It is obvious, however, that the population can not continue to grow and sooner or later will have to stabilize in relation to ecological givens. But from this it does not follow that the current size of the population is responsible for the poverty existing in the world. A level of production adequate to the needs of the increasing population would very likely show that it is too soon to speak of an absolute overpopulation. The percentage growth in production and productivity of agriculture in countries like the United States and Australia exceeds by far the percentage of population increase. Although the same results cannot be achieved everywhere, even with the same methods, it is certainly still possible to increase the world’s production of food meaningfully. And with a general improvement of living conditions can we expect to see a conscious decrease in population growth. Of course, this can also be achieved through the use of state violence, the method prized by Harich. Thus in India at the moment bills have been proposed mandating forced sterilization, to be imposed on all families after their second child. From this it is only a small step to the direct extermination of excessive people. But there is also another thing: While it is so far the privilege of a minority of the world’s population, the level of birth control already achieved in the developed countries demonstrates the possibility of population planning, which in the course of time could not only stabilize the population but even diminish it. The warnings of Harich and the Club of Rome would be completely senseless if they were not accompanied by the conviction that the threatening ecological catastrophe can be prevented. The idea that this is a real possibility in itself means that whether humanity still has an indefinite future depends on society and not on nature. For Harich the destruction of capitalist production is the unavoidable presupposition for this future. Only in this way can the ecological problem find a general solution. But what he has in mind is not a revolution that might lead to a communist society, the only kind of society that would be in a position to solve the ecological problem. The Club of Rome cannot even imagine Harich’s pseudo-revolution but relies on the good will and readiness of enlightened statesmen to take the measures necessary to solve the ecological problem. But we cannot expect from this quarter measures that would do away with the social structure and so with its statesmen themselves. What, then, is to be done in this apparently hopeless situation? In general, nothing, so long as the problem is looked at from the standpoint of ecology. It is, first of all, not the thing that is most obvious that threatens the continuing existence of humankind. The “ecological crisis” is to a great extent itself a product of a situation of social crisis, and the approaching catastrophe arising from the latter is coming sooner than the ecological catastrophe. As things stand today, the great likelihood of conflicts involving atomic warfare makes concern with the ecological crisis superfluous. We need to concentrate on social processes to stop the atomic criminals of East and West. If the world’s workers do not succeed in this they will also not be in a position to counter the ecological threat or to create the communist society that would make possible the further existence of humanity. 1.Wolfgang Harich, Kommunismus ohne Wachtum? Babeuf und der “Club of Rome.” Sechs Interviews mit Freimut Duve und Briefe an ihn. (Hamburg: Reinbek, 1975). 2.MECW, vol. 38, p. 425. 3.Donella Meadows, et al., The Limits to Growth (1972) and Mihailo Mersarovic and Eduard Pestel, Mankind at the Turning Point (1975). 4.Hans Linnemann, MOIRA: model of international relations in agriculture: report of the project group 'Food for a Doubling World Population'(Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1980).

Students are going on strike around the world to demand action on climate change, in a movement led almost entirely by teenage girls.

By Paul Cockshott, Paul Cockshott's Blog, March 5, 2017 New Harmony Utopian community designed by Robert Owen The term law of value has exoteric and esoteric meanings. The exoteric or superficial meaning is that in capitalist type economy, relative labour values will act as an attractor for relative prices. The more esoteric meaning is that the distribution relations in all societies are constrained by the distribution of labour. In a capitalist economy the great branches of production subsist by trade and their respective revenues have at least to be roughly proportional to the populations that they support. Although in a socialist economy the great bulk of the economy is publicly run, the distribution of the population accross sectors of the economy continues to exert an influence as does the fact that the population still live in households. This may seem an unexceptional observation, but communist organisations that grew up within previous class societies dispensed with the household as an institution. Think of a monastic community or Owen’s New Harmony. In such householdless communities there would be no personal property as opposed to community property. Food preparation, was communal, and childcare was either abolished as in monastic orders, or carried out communally. But if you have households then private property of the household is distinct from community property. Since the composition and consumption needs of households differ, it is impractical to give all households a uniform ration of goods. An old couple would have little need for children’s shoes or toys, for example. So a socialist economy with households has to allow some flexibilty in consumption, which they have achieved by distributing a portion of people’s income in money. In principle they could have used something other than coins and notes. They could have kept social credit accounts or labour accounts for people, but in all cases, many goods for household consumption would have something very like a price. In a socialist society then, with households, how does the esoteric aspect of the law of value, the underlying constraint posed by the social division of labour, express itself? 1.1 Intersectoral relations I shall divide the socialist economy into three sectors The production of means of production. The production of articles of personal consumption that are distributed for sale or charge to individual workers’ families. At this point it makes no difference whether the articles are sold for actual money, or against the debit of a labour account. The provision of uncharged services such as education, healthcare, defence, and public infrasctucture. This is not to say that being conscripted into the army is not a charge on the conscript, but that they do not individually have to pay in cash or labour credits for their military service. Similarly education costs adult society time and resources, and costs the pupils their play time, but it is assumed that there are no school fees. I will use the subscripts 1,2,3 to denote these sectors. Sectors 1 and 2 produce physical outputs, that is to say they are materially productive in the sense of Adam Smith’s use of the term productive. I will call the output of sector 1 machines, though it also includes all other means of production, and will use the symbol m, in lowercase to indicate a flow, for the gross output of machines and the stock of machinery and equipment used in the sectors as M1,M2,M3. Machines wear out. I assume that a fraction δ of them wear out each year. So for the sectors the flow of new machines needed to simply stand still is given as δM1,δM2,δM3. If the economy is growing there will be some surplus flow of machinery over wear and tear, set asside for growth, which I will call mg. (1) mg = m −( δM1+δM2+δM3) I will assume that the working population is P divided into P1,P2,P3 working in the three sectors, and that for each year of work the government credits a person with a wage of w either by paying them cash or by recording some units into their personal consumption account in a database. The state also, for budgetary purposes has to account for the usage of machinery and equipment in different sectors right down to the individual factories, hospitals etc. The accounting unit for such charging is assumed to be the same, either money, labour hours, concievably energy, as is used for personal consumption accounts. I will use c for the charging rate for a machine. This then gives the current accounting costs Ci of each sector, assuming that the government does not charge itself interest, of (2) C1=cδM1+wP1 (3) C2=cδM2+wP2 (4) C3=cδM3+wP3 The accounting costs of each sector are made up of the charge for the use of publicly owned machinery , and the payments to the people working there. The first is a charge internal to the public sector but the government has to carry out such sectoral charging if it is to make overall budgetary decisions about the scale of the sectors. The only point at which an actual sale, with change of ownership, happens is when the output of the consumer goods industry is sold to the working population. I will call this the bread or baking industry and label the total output of the industry b and the price of bread p. If we assume for the moment that there is no mechanism by which the working population can save, then we have (5) pb=w(P1+P2+P3)(1−t) where t is the income tax rate. That is to say, the price of bread times the bread output equals the after tax income that the working population gets. This is their money wage but in addition they consume a social wage of education, healthcare etc provided by public sector 3. Equation 5 gives the price of bread as a function of the money wage. It is not so obvious how the government should set the charge for machinery used by the public sector but one obvious way is to set the charge for machines at their imputed cost of production (6) c=C1/m The tax revenue plus any profit on sales of consumer goods is then used to cover the cost of the free public services and the net accumulation of new machinery (7) cmg+C3=tw(P1+P2+P3)+pb−C2 We have 7 equations 1 to 7 with 8 unbound variables mg,c,w,t,p ,C1,C2,C3. I assume that m, b, M1,M2,M3, P1,P2,P3, δ are fixed by the actual structure of activity so in principle the government could fix either the tax rate or the wage rate, but having done that, all the other variables are constrained. Let us look at options. I will present a simple example and compare the effect of different wage and tax policies. Sector P M output 1 4000000 250000 100000 2 6000000 250000 1000000000 3 5000000 250000 no physical output The wage is fixed at 1, this ends up equivalent to valuing things at labour values, no profit is made on the sale of consumer goods and income taxes are adjusted to meet the cost of the public services and accumulation. We end up with 2. p 3. c 4. t 5. income tax rev 6. turnover tax rev 7. 0.0073 8. 53.3 9. 51% 10. 7666570 11. 0 12. In this scenario income tax is held low at 10% and the price of the consumer goods have to rise to cover the shortfall in government revenue. Given that the physical output of consumer goods stays the same, the only effect of reducing income tax is to increase prices. The net effect is that the goverment raises most of its income from what can either be viewed as a tax on consumer goods, or on the profits of nationalised industry. Wages turn out to be the same, as does the charge for means of production, but consumer goods cost almost twice as much. 14. p 15. c 16. t 17. income tax rev 18. turnover tax rev 19. 0.0135 20. 53.3 21. 10% 22. 1500000 23. 6166666 24. The relative prices of machinery and bread now diverge significantly from labour values, with bread being sold at a premium due to the tax being levied on it. The conclusion is that the extent to which a socialist government can disregard labour values is constrained by the level of income tax that they levy. If they rely on income tax for public revenue, then sectoral prices will be proportional to labour values. If they attempt to curtail income tax to a level too low to support public services, then the price of consumer goods has to be raised in what amounts to a sales tax to prevent the accumulation of purchasing power in the hands of the public, and thus suppressed inflation. 1.2 Intra sectional constraints Even if you assume that the number of people allocated to make consumption goods does not change, that still leaves considerable flexibility in what consumer goods are made. Asume the intention is to adjust output to consumer wants as expressed by the goods they chose to spend their social credits on. What does this imply for the relative prices of goods? Should these relative prices correspond to relative labour values? Yes they must, for it is only under this condition that the attempted adjustments people make in their consumption will be compatible with the pre-determined number of people working making consumer goods. Suppose that one group of goods – say furniture is systematically undervalued compared to another group of goods, let us say clothes. Suppose clothes are priced at par for labour values and furniture is sold at a 50% discount with respect to its labour value. Note that it does not matter if the social credits are measured in hours or in some arbitrary currency units, there will always be some quantity of the currency that, averaged accross all prices, represents an hour of embodied labour. Consumers then attempt to shift part of their clothes consumption to furniture. Suppose they cut clothes consumption by the equivalent of 100 million hours of credits, and switch these credits to furniture. Since the furniture is being marked at a 50% discount, these 100 million hours of credits switched from clothing appear to be enough to buy furniture that took 200 million hours to make. Even if the workers who in the past worked the 100 million hours in the clothing industry were shifted to make furniture, that would not provide enough additional labour to make 200 million hour’s worth of chairs, tables etc. More generally, if prices are not proportional to labour values, then shifts in purchases from one good to another will lead either to patterns of demand that to big to be met with the existing workforce, or if the demand shift goes from undervalued to overvalued goods, to unemployment and short time working in the consumer goods industry.

By Michael A. Peters, Journal of Educational Philosophy and Theory, 2019 “The Tennis Court Oath,” a key moment in the French people’s resistance to absolute monarchy in 1789, by Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825) in 1791, and the cover of Jonathan Israel’s A Revolution of the Mind (2010). The Enlightenment, often referred to as ‘The Age of Reason’, is sometimes periodised by French historians as the years 1715, the death of Louis XIV, and 1789, the start of the French Revolution. The French referred to the eighteenth century as le Siècle des Lumières; the Germans, as Aufklärung; the Italians, as L’Illuminismo; the Polish, as Oświecenie; and the Spanish, as La Ilustración. It is now common place to talk of the ‘long’ eighteenth century comprised of Early Enlightenment (1685–1730), the High Enlightenment (1730–1780), and the Late Enlightenment (1780–1815). 2 ‘The Enlightenment’ as a signifier as had pride of place in European intellectual history synonymous with the development of public reason, secular liberalism, democracy and the seat of modernity yet only recently has criticism begun to rework the historical category of ‘the Enlightenment’ in terms of its geography and history but also in terms of its historical significance as the grand narrative through which European and American manufacture their own historical self-image in the service of ‘Western history’. The standard received view is that Bacon, Hobbes and Descartes, along with ‘natural philosophers’ of the Scientific Revolution Galileo, Kepler and Leibniz, were important precursors. In the standard account the Enlightenment is traced back to England in the 1680 and to the publication of two texts—Isaac Newton’s (1686) Principia Mathematica and John Locke’s (1689) Essay Concerning Human Understanding. The period of high enlightenment focuses on the French ‘philosophes’ including Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Buffon and Diderot, characterised by the Voltaire’s (1764) Philosophical Dictionary and Diderot’s Encyclopédie (1751–77). During this period both Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson founding father of the American Constitution took up Enlightenment ideas, especially those of Locke as the basis of the conception of American society. The so-called Late Enlightenment was dominated by Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) whose Critique of Pure Reason (1781), alongside his other critiques (The Critique of Practical Reason, 1788; The Critique of Judgement, 1790), came to be viewed as the monumental work that initiated modern philosophy by seeking to determine the limits of reason and metaphysics—that is, what kind of claims can reason be expected to establish securely. Often Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) is included in the potted history as a philosopher of equality and women’s rights. The standard short view is expressed by the Encyclopedia Britannica in the following terms: Enlightenment, French siècle des Lumières (literally ‘century of the Enlightened’), German Aufklärung, a European intellectual movement of the 17th and 18th centuries in which ideas concerning God, reason, nature, and humanity were synthesized into a worldview that gained wide assent in the West and that instigated revolutionary developments in art, philosophy, and politics. Central to Enlightenment thought were the use and celebration of reason, the power by which humans understand the universe and improve their own condition. The goals of rational humanity were considered to be knowledge, freedom, and happiness. https://www.britannica.com/event/Enlightenment-European-history William Bristow (2010) begins his entry ‘Enlightenment’ for The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy by focusing on the French philosophes: The heart of the eighteenth century Enlightenment is the loosely organized activity of prominent French thinkers of the mid-decades of the eighteenth century, the so-called philosophes (e.g. Voltaire, D’Alembert, Diderot and Montesquieu). The philosophes constituted an informal society of men of letters who collaborated on a loosely defined project of Enlightenment exemplified by the project of the Encyclopedia …. However, there are noteworthy centres of Enlightenment outside of France as well. There is a renowned Scottish Enlightenment (key figures are Frances Hutcheson, Adam Smith, David Hume, Thomas Reid), a German Enlightenment (die Aufklärung, key figures of which include Christian Wolff, Moses Mendelssohn, G.E. Lessing and Immanuel Kant), and there are also other hubs of Enlightenment and Enlightenment thinkers scattered throughout Europe and America in the eighteenth century. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/enlightenment/ Following D’Alembert, Bristow depicts the Enlightenment has having ‘its primary origin in the scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries’ and in its successes in describing and explaining the natural world. He also asserts that ‘The Enlightenment is often associated with its political revolutions and ideals, especially the French Revolution of 1789’ substituting a reason-based order of civil society for the ancien regime. Rather than a period Bristow mentions that Enlightenment thinkers conceived of the Enlightenment as a state of mind, as a set of philosophical and spiritual processes, best exemplified in Kant’s (1784) essay ‘An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?’ where he refers to it as ‘humankind’s release from its self-incurred immaturity; “immaturity is the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another.”’ Kant’s essay was submitted on invitation to the German periodical the Berliniische Monatsschrift, a monthly magazine edited by Johan Erich Biester and Friedrich Gedike, in response to the question pose a year earlier by the Rev Johan Friedrich Zoller, a Prussian government official. His question ‘What is Enlightenment?’ was addressed to the intellectual community at large. Kant provides his answer in the first line of his response: ‘Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity’ and he exclaims ‘Sapere aude’ (Dare to think for yourself!) as the motto of the Enlightenment. The question is primarily one of courage and Kant whose moral system rests on the concept of autonomy suggests that people must throw off their dependent and childish status and think for themselves rather than relying on the Church or the State. Only through the use of public reason can people become free thinking and learn to trust their own reasoned judgement. The metaphor of exiting from immaturity immediately brings to mind education as cultivation of the intellect and use of reason. It also introduces the difference between children and adults suggesting that the aim of education is to encourage children to become fully autonomous moral human beings. But Kant’s notion of exit also carried a historical or evolutionary note for the human species. Moses Mendelssohn, the German Jewish philosopher who was an influential figure in the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskala) had responded to the same question in the same periodical three month earlier, opening with this paragraph, translated for the first time by James Schmidt: The words ‘enlightenment’, ‘culture’, and ‘education’ are newcomers to our language. They currently belong only to literary discourse. The masses scarcely believe understand them. Does this prove that these things are also new to us? I believe not. One says of a certain people that they have no specific word for ‘virtue’, or none for ‘superstition’, and yet one may justly attribute a not insignificant measure of both to them. https://persistentenlightenment.com/2014/03/18/moses-mendelssohn-on-enlightening-the-mind/ Mendelssohn writes further Civilization may be divided into cultivation and enlightening the public mind, the former of which seems to be chiefly practical, and to consist of refinement, beauty, and perfection in mechanics, in the arts, and in the manners of society of talents and industry in the arts, and of moral inclinations and propensities…. It may be said that the inhabitants of Nuremberg and of France are more cultivated, those of Berlin and of England more enlightened, while the Chinese are highly cultivated, but very unenlightened: the Greeks possessed both these qualities. https://persistentenlightenment.com/2014/03/18/moses-mendelssohn-on-enlightening-the-mind/ Mendelssohn in line with his rationalism argues for the liberalisation of Judaism and the abolition of Judaism’s coercive authority while remaining faithful to the Jewish tradition. Both Kant and Mendelssohn are important figures in the development of political liberalism and liberal education yet both perpetrate the idea that the Enlightenment is a single idea, a single process, and a single narrative. Historiography of the enlightenment In an important essay J. G. A. Pocock (2008, p. 84) on the historiography of the Enlightenment writes ‘Enlightenment’ is a word or signifier, and not a single or unifiable phenomenon which it consistently signifies. There is no single or unifiable phenomenon describable as ‘the Enlightenment’…. He argues that while there are important connections between different applications of the term ‘they cannot be reduced to a single narrative.’ There is no single account but only a family of ways of talking about it. In this initial context Pocock refers to John Robertson’s (2005) The Case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples, 1680–1740 who ascribes the term first to Naples then to Scotland to describe ‘a moral philosophy that made humans capable of society without needing recourse to God, and then by a political economy that elaborated their capacities in the settings of history and commerce’ (p. 84). He also contemplates the possibility of a ‘Protestant Enlightenment’ emphasizing ‘the historization of the debates over Christ’s nature’ as an aspect of rational criticism in Christology, religious history and textual criticism by reference to Jean Le Clerc who replaced theology with the history of theology thus historizing it as a discourse of ‘natural’ human society. Summarising in crude terms, the result was that Christ became an object of historical criticism and philosophy was expanded to ‘civil philosophy’ to be aided by political economy to suggest that the history of ‘natural’ society did not need the hypothesis of God: the growth of civil society did not require a theological justification. Pocock (2008, p. 95) puts his argument: To this writer the specificity of ‘Enlightenment’ is better displayed in its plurality than in its unity; there is more, and richer, Enlightenment if there are many and diverse Enlightenments than if it is reduced to a single process. In the present case, it was one kind of Enlightenment to question whether God was necessary to society, another to question whether any church continued the being of God as man. If ‘Western history’ concerns the ‘supersession of the scared’ and ‘the reduction of the divine to the human’, Pocock (2008, p. 96) raises the question of what counts as history especially when Enlightened Europeans studied Chinese civilisation. Does the history of Confucian China count as history for Enlightenment thinkers? It is noteworthy that both Voltaire and Leibniz both saw China as an ancient civilization that possessed the wisdom the West lacked. Bayle and Montesquieu on China suggests that Enlightenment thinkers attempted to reconcile ethical universalism and cultural diversity with limited success. Neo-Confucian thought was valued by Enlightenment thinkers to be the ideal deistic system and had an effect on secularism including the idea of civil service. Bettina Brandt (2016) argues ‘Over the course of the eighteenth century, European intellectuals shifted from admiring China as a utopian place of wonder to despising it as a backwards and despotic state.’ This reversal emerged from ‘Enlightenment conceptions of political identity and Europe’s own burgeoning global power’ and became the basis for German Orientalism and the origins of modern race theory. On the whole, however, China was viewed by Enlightenment historians as not possessing history because the perception was that it had not progressed rather it was seen as a certain timelessness and of not having a history reducible to rational understanding. These views became more pronounced in Kant and Hegel. Hegel, for instance, writes: ‘The History of the World travels from East to West, for Europe is absolutely the end of History, Asia the Beginning’ (Hegel, 1837/1953). For Hegel, the history of Western modernity is intimately connected with the concept of the western state, and the history of Chinese government as the history of a despotic state. Chinese history was considered static and non-dialectical. The same ethnocentric and racist assumptions vitiated Enlightenment accounts of world history that extolled characteristics of European ‘progress’ as the apex of development and encouraged unfavourable comparisons with other part of the world. The historiography of the Enlightenment is not just a question of ‘many, not one’—on the plurality of Enlightenment themes but also its conceptual variations (like a musical score) that invokes Wittgenstein’s (1953) ‘family resemblance’ argument that in effect points to overlapping concepts with no essence. While, of course, we can talk about the history of the Enlightenment ideas of freedom, equality, science, autonomy, rationalism, etc. and their various combinations and the paradoxes they can generate, one of the keys to unlocking their conceptual resources is to investigate their social origins and histories, that is, how they were lived and experienced. Historiography also lends itself naturally to the interpretation of historical documents and to interpretation as history that can tell the story from different points of view—of women, of children, of non-Europeans, of those Europeans not from the imperial powers of France, Britain and Germany. Such historiography reveals also not only multiple and sometimes conflicting accounts of the Enlightenment but also its dark side. Famously, Horkheimer and Adorno (1947) referred to ‘the dialectic of the Enlightenment’. While it aimed at human liberation the Enlightenment’s instrumental reason enslaved humanity and led to their death in large numbers. The Nazi Holocaust was not an exception. Reason, they argued, had become irrational. Yet they do not reject the Enlightenment but point to its double nature in terms of formation: ‘Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology’ (p. xviii). Others have celebrated ‘the dark Enlightenment’ which has become the motif those who would turn Nietzsche into a philosopher of the alt-right. 3 The idea and history of the Enlightenment continues to be active in philosophy and politics today but historiography of the Enlightenment reveals that there were voices raised against the Enlightenment at the time and after, beginning with Vico and Nietzsche. The dark side of the enlightenment The claim that the Enlightenment was racist and the home of modern race thinking has created a storm, encouraging us to confront our constructed histories of the Enlightenment by acknowledging its dark side. Bouie (2018) begins his article for Slate The Enlightenment is having a renaissance, of sorts. A handful of centrist and conservative writers have reclaimed the 17th- and 18th-century intellectual movement as a response to nationalism and ethnic prejudice on the right and relativism and ‘identity politics’ on the left. Among them are Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychologist who sees himself as a bulwark against the forces of ‘chaos’ and ‘postmodernism’; Steven Pinker, the Harvard cognitive psychologist who argues, in Enlightenment Now, for optimism and human progress against those ‘who despise the Enlightenment ideals of reason, science, humanism, and progress’; and conservative pundit Jonah Goldberg, who, in Suicide of the West, argues in defense of capitalism and Enlightenment liberalism, twin forces he calls ‘the Miracle’ for creating Western prosperity. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/06/taking-the-enlightenment-seriously-requires-talking-about-race.html For Pinker and Petersen, the Enlightenment ‘is a straightforward story of progress’ celebrating Western rationalism, science and classical liberalism but forgetting or ignoring the more troublesome episodes. Pinker’s (2018) polemical work is a continuation of the high levels of optimism of The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011) that celebrates the Enlightenment for ‘the goal of maximizing human flourishing—life, health, happiness, freedom, knowledge, love, richness of experience.’ The trouble is that Pinker does not engage with the years of scholarship on the Enlightenment or the arguments developed by scholars over the years but presents evidence-based data. 4 His interpretation of Nietzsche defies all scholarly conventions: he writes of Nietzsche’s ‘genocidal ravings’ that ‘inspired the romantic militarism that led to the First World War and the Fascism of the Second’ as well as becoming ‘the Nazi court philosopher’—‘Nietzsche was an inspiration to relativists everywhere’, ‘Distaining the truth-seeking among scientists and Enlightenment thinkers’. While he can attribute and name some of those Nietzsche influenced—Heidegger, Sartre, Derrida, Foucault—Pinker is on the side of the Enlightenment and against all Nietzsche followers and those that want to inquire into the Enlightenment’s historical self-image. It’s a pity he hasn’t read Foucault’s essay on the Enlightenment. Another best-selling psychologist who by contrast is Nietzsche’s friend even though his favourite target for scathing but uninformed criticism is ‘postmodern neo-Marxism’. He extracts a Nietzsche that bolsters his defence of ‘classical liberalism’ that borders on fascism to support the alt-right and he uses it to criticise the ‘postmodern Left’, all without reading or engaging with anything of the Nietzsche canon of criticism. 5 His colleague Ronald Beiner (2018) in Dangerous Minds: Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the Return of the Far Right traces the philosophical roots of the alt-right including Richard Spencer, Aleksandr Dugin, and Steve Bannon to the writings of Nietzsche and Heidegger and their rejection of the Enlightenment and liberal democracy. Beiner (2018, p. 24) writes ‘Western civilization is going down the toilet because of too much emphasis on truth and rationality and too much emphasis on equal human dignity’. He evinces a similar hysterical reading of Nietzsche as Pinker does in his heroic defence of the Enlightenment against the scourge of Nietzsche. 6 What is interesting about these contemporary interventions concerning the Enlightenment and its Nietzschean critique is that it has fuelled both the intellectual sources of Nietzsche for the alt-right, and the Left, as well as an impassioned defence of the Enlightenment by those who want see themselves as protecting the liberal-democracy way of life. Nietzsche is alive and well and throwing sticks of dynamite into the fray. It is also a revitalisation of the question of the Enlightenment but in most cases the polemic has been truncated from most of the tradition of Enlightenment and Nietzsche criticism of the last couple of hundred years. These are positions in the raw, so to speak, made straight off the page without the mediating wisdom of textual criticism. It is as though these contemporary critics thumb their noses at history, humanities and criticism. By contrast, I feel obliged even within the scope of this brief essay to provide an acknowledgement, at least, of some of the great scholars and interpreters that have gone before. Of course, as we will find every great philosopher generates sympathetic and aggravated criticism. Isaiah Berlin (1954) wrote The Age of the Enlightenment initiating a new trend in intellectual history. His history was uneven focusing on English writers Locke, Hume, and Berkeley at the expense of the French philosophes (except for Voltaire). As Ritchie Robertson (2017) remarks in his Voltaire Foundation blog: ‘In all Berlin’s subsequent references to the Enlightenment, this utopian doctrine reappears. The Enlightenment stands for the hope of reshaping the world through rational education and leading humanity towards a perfect society’ (https://voltairefoundation.wordpress.com/2017/04/18/isaiah-berlin-and-the-enlightenment/). Brockliss and Robertson’s (2016) recent collection Isaiah Berlin and the Enlightenment criticises Berlin’s readings Enlightenment thinkers. 7 Both before and after Berlin there has been a veritable outpouring of books on the Enlightenment. One source identifies 224 works, often on single philosophers of the Enlightenment. 8 There are a set of classic interpretations or works of intellectual history and a number of recent additions that focus on why is still matters, the Encyclopédie, foundations of the modern age, the Islamic Enlightenment, the religious Enlightenment, the American Enlightenment, and the democratic Enlightenment. 9 Berlin coined the term ‘Counter-Enlightenment’ to describe multiple strands of thinking originating in the late eighteenth century that provide a critique of Enlightenment themes and acting as a forerunner to German Romanticism of the nineteenth century. The fact is that both Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) and Nietzsche were critics of the Enlightenment but also tied to it. In works like De Antiquissima Italorum Sapientia, Vico (1710) opposed both Cartesian metaphysics and the expansion of modern rationalism. And in Scienza Nuova (The New Science, 1725) he return to a pre-modern form of reasoning initiating modern historiography, a philosophy of history based on the method of narrative. Like Marx, Vico saw the achievement of equality not in terms of the intellectual history of ideas but the result of social class struggle. Nietzsche’s (1844–1900) thought is no less than a comprehensive attack on Enlightenment thought which also initiated one of the latest and most important revivals of Nietzsche and his critique of the Enlightenment in the works of Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Sarah Kofman and others. Lewis Call’s (1995) Nietzsche as Critic and Captive of Enlightenment (https://scrye.com/∼station/dissertation.html) provides a useful set of ideas that explore Nietzsche’s critique of the Enlightenment’s utopianism especially its faith in ‘progress’, his attacks of the origins of the Enlightenment especially Cartesian rationality, his critique of Rousseau (that Nietzsche labels Nietzsche contra Rousseau), his critique of Kant’s rational system of morality based on the autonomous subject that is used also to attack the political systems of the day, and his critique of nineteenth century rationality and scientific method. Call (1995) comments Nietzsche gives us, then, a detailed and sustained critique of the Enlightenment on several levels. He attacked both the early Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the later Enlightenment of his own nineteenth century. He attacked the enlightened ideal of rationality and the rational, autonomous subject; he went on to critique the politics of that subject. He added to this critique an attack on scientific rationalism and the cult of progress. And yet, most importantly, Call (1995) also remarks that Nietzsche did not escape the Enlightenment: Though he was constantly critical of the Enlightenment's tendency to privilege rationality above all else, Nietzsche frequently expressed a grudging and sometimes enthusiastic appreciation for the possibilities of a less exclusive kind of rationality. His relentless assault on conventional ideas of Enlightened subjectivity did not prevent him from developing a radically new concept of individual selfhood, which he named overman. His attack on the world view of enlightened scientists did not preclude his use of scientific rigor in his own work. And on the issue of progress, Nietzsche's critique was especially limited. Deleuze’s (1962) Nietzsche and Philosophy and conferences that Deleuze organised in the 1970s became a platform for the new French Nietzsche that inspired a radical non-dialectical and positive mode of philosophy that departed from the Enlightenment and took issues with many of its cherished beliefs. Foucault, between Kant and Nietzsche, and influenced by Deleuze’s book saw Nietzsche as a genealogical philosopher who helped him to reconceptualise the concept of power both in relation to truth and the subject. In his ‘What is Enlightenment?’, almost as famous as Kant’s essay, Foucault (1984) 10 reflecting on a philosophy of the present writes: Now the way Kant poses the question of Aufklärung is entirely different: it is neither a world era to which one belongs, nor an event whose signs are perceived, nor the dawning of an accomplishment. Kant defines Aufklärung in an almost entirely negative way, as an Ausgang, an ‘exit,’ a ‘way out.’ And he goes on Kant indicates right away that the ‘way out’ that characterizes Enlightenment is a process that releases us from the status of ‘immaturity.’ And by ‘immaturity,’ he means a certain state of our will that makes us accept someone else’s authority to lead us in areas where the use of reason is called for… He characterizes it as a phenomenon, an ongoing process; but he also presents it as a task and an obligation. From the very first paragraph, he notes that man himself is responsible for his immature status. Foucault comments on Kant’s distinction between public and private reason suggesting ‘reason must be free in its public use, and must be submissive in its private use’ and he poses the question: ‘We can readily see how the universal use of reason (apart from any private end) is the business of the subject himself as an individual … but how is a public use of that reason to be assured?’ As he explains the problem appears as a political one: ‘the public and free use of autonomous reason will be the best guarantee of obedience, on condition, however, that the political principle that must be obeyed itself be in conformity with universal reason.’ Foucault presents Kant’s definition as an anthropology of reason, a kind of evolutionary step forward for humanity, linking it to the three Critiques the moment when humanity is going to put its own reason to use, without subjecting itself to any authority; now it is precisely at this moment that the critique is necessary, since its role is that of defining the conditions under which the use of reason is legitimate in order to determine what can be known, what must be done, and what may be hoped. Foucault locates Kant’s text as a reflection on the present and a history of humanity’s political evolution that Foucault christens as ‘the attitude to modernity’. And he explains further I know that modernity is often spoken of as an epoch, or at least as a set of features characteristic of an epoch; situated on a calendar, it would be preceded by a more or less naive or archaic premodernity, and followed by an enigmatic and troubling ‘postmodernity.’ And then we find ourselves asking whether modernity constitutes the sequel to the Enlightenment and its development, or whether we are to see it as a rupture or a deviation with respect to the basic principles of the 18th century. Foucault creative philosophical interpretation uses Kant’s text to repudiate standard historical periodizing—the Enlightenment, Modernity—to refocus on the cultivation of an attitude Thinking back on Kant’s text, I wonder whether we may not envisage modernity rather as an attitude than as a period of history. And by ‘attitude,’ I mean a mode of relating to contemporary reality; a voluntary choice made by certain people; in the end, a way of thinking and feeling; a way, too, of acting and behaving that at one and the same time marks a relation of belonging and presents itself as a task. A bit, no doubt, like what the Greeks called an ethos. And consequently, rather than seeking to distinguish the ‘modern era’ from the ‘premodern’ or ‘postmodern,’ I think it would be more useful to try to find out how the attitude of modernity, ever since its formation, has found itself struggling with attitudes of ‘countermodernity.’ After lingering over Kant’s text Foucault concludes the first half of his essay with the words: I have been seeking to stress that the thread that may connect us with the Enlightenment is not faithfulness to doctrinal elements, but rather the permanent reactivation of an attitude—that is, of a philosophical ethos that could be described as a permanent critique of our historical era. In the second half of the essay he proceeds to characterize this ethos in a way that acts as a ‘permanent critique of ourselves’ in order ‘to avoid the always too facile confusions between humanism and Enlightenment.’ Rather than the simple equation: Western education = the Enlightenment (or some such version…’should be based on Enlightenment principles’—maybe even ‘we must teach the Enlightenment as the basis of modernity, or Western education = Enlightenment humanism), we might take Foucault seriously and embrace the critical ethos that ‘still entails faith in the Enlightenment’. The philosophical narrative of the Enlightenment does not end here (or, fortunately, with Pinker). In France, a new generation of philosophers including Marcel Gauchet, Pierre Manent, Luc Ferry, and Alain Renaut have embraced the main articles of faith of liberal democracy against the critics of liberal society. The culture of criticism that embodies the Kantian notion of critique and historical norms of interpretation demonstrates that the Enlightenment is not just a chapter in intellectual history but a living force Notes 1 This essay was written for students in my Masters course in educational theory at Beijing Normal University in the last days of Golden Week when the weather was glorious. 2 See e.g. https://www.history.com/topics/british-history/enlightenment on which I base the standard account. 3 See Nick Land’s ‘The Dark Enlightenment’, http://www.thedarkenlightenment.com/the-dark-enlightenment-by-nick-land/ 4 See reviews at https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2018/5/17/17362548/pinker-enlightenment-now-two-cultures-rationality-war-debate, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/04/steven-pinker-enlightenment-now/554054/, https://harvardmagazine.com/2018/03/steven-pinker-enlightenment-now 5 See savage reviews of his work at https://jacobinmag.com/2018/02/jordan-peterson-enlightenment-nietzsche-alt-right; https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/04/04/god-is-ted-jordan-peterson-self-help-men/; https://www.newstatesman.com/2018/08/why-nietzsche-has-once-again-become-inspiration-far-right but also see https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/25/opinion/jordan-peterson-moment.html 6 For reviews see https://www.counter-currents.com/2018/04/ronald-beiners-dangerous-minds/; https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/16017_dangerous-minds-nietzsche-heidegger-and-the-return-of-the-far-right-by-ronald-beiner-reviewed-by-javier-sethness/; https://www.chronicle.com/article/When-Neo-Nazis-Love-Your-Book/243746; https://www.afr.com/lifestyle/arts-and-entertainment/books/why-nietzsche-has-once-again-become-an-inspiration-to-the-farright-20180903-h14v90 7 See the review by Charles Blattberg (2017) in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/isaiah-berlin-and-the-enlightenment/ 8 https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/2980.The_Enlightenment_and_its_Impact 9 Ernest Cassirer (1932/2009) The Philosophy of the Enlightenment argues that while there were diverse strands of thought, there was a common foundation: ‘The real philosophy of the Enlightenment is not the simply … what its leading thinkers … thought and taught [as] it consists less in certain individual doctrines than in the form and manner of intellectual activity in general.’ Robert Darnton’s (1987) The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie, 1775–1800 is concerned the form of the thought of the great philosophes in the material form of great books.Peter Gay’s (1995, 2013) The Enlightenment: The rise of modern paganism (Vol 1) and The Enlightenment: The Science of Freedom (Vol2) can be understood as a program of secularism, humanity and above all freedom in its many different forms but fundamentally as humanity's claim to be recognized as adult, responsible beings. In Enlightenment's Wake: Politics and Culture at the Close of the Modern Age John Gray (1995/2007) suggest The Enlightenment’s secular idealism takes over from Christian salvation and becomes a political religion with universal emancipation as its aim. See also The Enlightenment: And Why It Still Matters, Anthony Padgen (2013); The Islamic Enlightenment : The Modern Struggle Between Faith and Reason, Christopher de Bellaigue (2018); Paul Hazard (2013) The Crisis of the European Mind: 1680–1715; Louis Dupre (2005) The Enlightenment and the Intellectual Foundations of Modern Culture; David Sorkin (2011) The Religious Enlightenment : Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from London to Vienna; Jonathan Israel (2013) Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights, 1750–1790. 10 https://foucault.info/documents/foucault.whatIsEnlightenment.en/ References Beiner, R . (2018). Dangerous minds: Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the return of the far right. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. [Crossref], [Google Scholar] Berlin, I . (1954). The age of the enlightenment: The 18th century philosophers. New York, NY, Mentor. [Google Scholar] Brandt, B. & Purdy, D . (Eds.) (2016). China in the German enlightenment. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. [Crossref], [Google Scholar] Bristow, W . (2017). Enlightenment. In Zalta, E. N . (Ed.) The stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (Fall 2017 Edition), Retrieved from https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2017/entries/enlightenment/ [Google Scholar] Brockliss, L. , & Robertson, R . (2016). Isaiah Berlin and the enlightenment. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [Crossref], [Google Scholar] Call, L . (1995). Nietzsche as critic and captive of enlightenment (Doctoral Dissertation). University of California, Irvine. Retrieved from https://scrye.com/∼station/dissertation.html [Google Scholar] Deleuze, G . (1962). Nietzsche and philosophy (Trans Hugh Tomlinson). New York, NY: Columbia University Press. [Google Scholar] Diderot , (1751/1777) ‘Encyclopédie’, Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, par une Société de Gens de lettres. Retrieved from http://encyclopedie.uchicago.edu/ [Google Scholar] Foucault, M . (1984). What is enlightenment? Retrieved from https://foucault.info/documents/foucault.whatIsEnlightenment.en/ [Google Scholar] Hegel. (1837/1953). Lectures on the philosophy of history. Retrieved from https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hi/hiconten.htm [Google Scholar] Horkheimer, T. & Adorno, (1947). Dialectic of enlightenment: Philosophical fragments. IN M. Horkheimer and T. W. Adorno (Eds.) G. S. Noerr, trans. E. Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Retrieved from https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/06/taking-the-enlightenment-seriously-requires-talking-about-race.html [Google Scholar] Bouie, J . (2018). The Enlightenment’s Dark Side: How the Enlightenment created modern race thinking, and why we should confront it . [Google Scholar] Locke, J . (1689). Essay concerning human understanding, Retrieved from http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/authors/l#a2447 [Google Scholar] Kant, I . (1781). Critique of pure reason.Retrieved from http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4280 [Google Scholar] Kant’s. (1784). An answer to the question: What is enlightenment? Retrieved from http://www.columbia.edu/acis/ets/CCREAD/etscc/kant.html [Google Scholar] Brockliss L. and Robertson R . (Eds.) (2016). Isaiah Berlin and the enlightenment (pp. 258). Oxford: Oxford University Press, ISBN 9780198783930. [Crossref], [Google Scholar] Lewis, C . (1995). Nietzsche as critic and captive of enlightenment (Doctoral Dissertation). University of California, Irvine. Retrieved from https://scrye.com/∼station/dissertation.html [Google Scholar] Newton, I . (1686). Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy). Retrieved from http://sites.trin.cam.ac.uk/manuscripts/NQ_16_200/manuscript.php?fullpage=1/ [Google Scholar] Pinker, S . (2011). The better angels of our nature. New York, NY, Penguin. [Google Scholar] Pinker, S . (2018). Enlightenment now: The case for reason, science, humanism, and progress. New York, NY: Viking. [Google Scholar] Pocock, J. G. A . (2008). Historiography and enlightenment: A view of their history. Modern Intellectual History, 5(1), 83–96. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar] Robertson, J . (2005). The case for the enlightenment: Scotland and Naples, 1680–1740. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Crossref], [Google Scholar] Vico, G . (1710). De antiquissima Italorum sapientia ex linguae latinae originibus eruenda libri tres (1710), On the most ancient wisdom of the Italians unearthed from the origins of the Latin language, including the disputation with “The Giornale de’ Letterati d’Italia” [1711], translated by L.M. Palmer. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. [Google Scholar] Vico, G . (1725). Scienza nuova the first new science, edited and translated by Leon Pompa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Google Scholar] Voltaire . (1764). Dictionnaire philosophique(Philosophical Dictionary). Retrieved from http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=A+Philosophical+Dictionary [Google Scholar] Wittgenstein, L . (1953). Philosophical investigations. Oxford: Blackwell. [Google Scholar]